Coral & Florida-Structuralism: New Works by Matt Town

Still from “CORAL” (2024) by Matt Town, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 11 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Coral & Florida-Structuralism: New Works by Matt Town

Sunday September 14th, 2025, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Artist Matt Town, guest speaker Michael Ned Holte and programmer Jorge Ravelo

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

https://link.dice.fm/ece161f5bf95

Los Angeles Filmforum welcomes local artist & experimental filmmaker Matt Town to screen new 16mm films and videos from his latest solo show “Coral” (2024) at Microscope Gallery, New York, as well as select older works dating back to 2014, which also appeared in earlier exhibitions.

Matt Town’s films are often thought-provoking, disciplined, and almost spiritual in their minimalistic delivery of themes like institutional critique, race, gentrification, gun culture, and the opioid crisis. His use of 16mm and Hi8 video never seems like a call to nostalgia, but rather a method for achieving transcendence in the theater. This approach aligns with the structuralist slow-cinema traditions of James Benning and Andy Warhol, while also possessing the discursive elements in conceptual art and institutional critique. This formal combination, paired with subject matters that engage with the harshness and absurdity commonly found in Town’s home state of Florida, is a gaze that can only be accurately described as “Florida-Structuralism”.  Every moment, medium, and sound for Town is intensely considered, treating art as a puzzle-like, uncomfortable yet meditative space that the viewer must interrogate to reach a new understanding of these themes.

Filmforum will screen six new works from Town’s most recent show, “Coral”: Gravemaking, Needles, Rehearsal, Nod, Training, and CORAL. The show's title references both the marine organisms and the first name of Town’s sister, Coral, who was in her thirties when she died in her home on the Florida Gulf Coast, where the artist is also from. The show produced a range of mixed media artworks in collaboration with Town’s family that served as both a method of grieving self reflection and collective healing in the wake of the tragedy. The show’s seminal artwork, CORAL, is a cinematic result of scuba lessons, training and research to create a “reef burial” memorial gravestone for his sister, into which Town mixed his sister’s ashes with environmentally friendly concrete to lay on the bottom of the California coast. 

Rehearsal and Training document the preparations and research for both the making of CORAL and the logistics of setting the gravestone in the ocean. Needles and Gravemaking step back from this personal journey to meditate on the landscape of coral fossils in Death Valley and observe a Florida facility that produces coral gravestones, respectively. Focused on context and procedure, these works reveal the careful labor and solemn environments that CORAL resides in, both metaphorically in the ancient space of coral reefs and the immediate bleakness of Florida life.

Bodies in these spaces are faced with danger, every breath and movement has to be meticulously rehearsed, tested or accounted for. Preceding these films are three past works by Town: SOAP, TRAP, and ROOF. These works situate the filmmaker in a space of self-reflection through an aesthetic of beauty and horror. The films SOAP and CORAL share a similar structure, composed of silent, beautiful slow-motion 16mm shots of a material procedure that transforms into an intense political image. SOAP establishes Matt Town’s formal groundwork for self and institutional critique, while CORAL allows the form to tap into something moving, transcendental, and healing for the heart.

Runtime: 59 minutes

Matt Town (b. 1989, Sarasota, Florida) is a Los Angeles-based artist working with moving image, photography, painting, installation and sculpture. His work is primarily concerned with a sense of community and one’s role within it and has appeared at Microscope Gallery, New York; eyes never sleep, New York; Last Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Box, Los Angeles, CA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; and The Horse, Dublin, Ireland, among others. His works have screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Millennium Film Workshop, New York, NY; UnionDocs, Brooklyn, NY; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; among others. His works have been discussed in Mousse Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, ARTnews, ArtObserved, Hyperallergic, and others. Matt Town received a BA in Film & Media Studies from the University of Florida in 2013 and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2017. Matt Town is represented by Microscope Gallery, New York.

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and educator living in Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at CalArts, and he currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Art. He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros, published in 2024 by Sming Sming Books. His curatorial projects include “how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith” at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, 2022; “Routine Pleasures” at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood, 2016; and the 2014 edition of “Made in L.A.” (with Connie Butler) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He is currently organizing the exhibition “Every artwork is a proposal: Simon Leung” for the Performance Art Museum.