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Thanksgiving Parade 2002
This is long but Matt was a great artist, one of the sweetest people anyone could know and deserves a bit of a tribute… I knew Matt well, first meeting him in his student days at CCS in the nineties. He and some other industrial design students had banded together to form an art collective they called the Propeller Company. Taru Lahti, John Bell, Mike McGillis and Camilo Pardo [now a super big time Ford designer] were members along with some others.
The Propellor artists took a space in an industrial building off Forest that my fellow MicroPointillist painter Stephen Goodfellow had pioneered. It has long since been demolished to make way for the Veterans hospital. But before it fell there were some legendary parties and great art created there.
While they came from industrial design the Propeller artists diverged into fine art. During that time Matt created an number of functional artworks that stood on their own as outstanding sculptures. He specialized in repurposing found and discarded heavy metal remains of industrial Detroit. He later evolved to a more purely fine artist and also grew his talents as a musician.
In 1995 I was invited by the Detroit Institute of Arts to participate in an exhibition called Interventions, where artists were to create something in context to the DIA's permanent collection--to intervene with it. It was kind of neat because instead of being all concentrated/ghettoized in one gallery, the show works were spread throughout the DIA creating pleasant surprises.
At that time I was being swept along by the browser-era internet which had just arrived the year before and, rather than displaying my paintings, wanted to express things digitally. My intervention concept was called "Total Intervention”. I used the Macromedia Director program to create an interactive onscreen virtual tour of the DIA where viewers, using a mouse, could click their way through the galleries of the DIA where I had photoshopped out the DIA art and replaced it with my friends' and my art works, hence the total intervention.
The idea was to beg the question of "what is art", even reality, in the age of digital manipulation and remote intervention--the computer was wired also to the internet allowing me to further alter the project from home during the show.
I didn't like the boring visual prospect of a dumpy computer on a table, so I convinced modern art director Jan Vander Marck to include Matt to build a display from industrial metal objects that would hide the monitor and computer, other than the screen and mouse, enhancing the industrial age / information age transformation being represented.
The result was this amazing sculptural creation that the DIA would later add to their collection.
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At the 4th Street Fair 2006
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Matt Blake at Union Street in 1999 with Chris Turner with whom he would create the Millennium Bell Sculpture in Grand Circus Park.
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https://youtu.be/IYZiXoF-BhE
Matt would die suddenly of a heart attack on May 10, 2008 at Age 43.
Obituary by Rebecca Mazzei, now owner the Trinosophe’s art space. Ten years losing his creativity already. Where do the years go?
