Matt Seavers

Abstract

My thesis centers on a series of oil paintings that explore how memory distorts and reshapes itself over time. Drawing from my own childhood in a working-class neighborhood—alleyways, backyards, overgrown lots, and half-forgotten pile-ons—I use paint to investigate how ordinary places become charged with emotion, myth, and personal significance. These works are not literal depictions of past events, but emotional reconstructions. I often start with a specific fragment—a cracked sidewalk, a chain-link fence, the tangle of limbs during a backyard brawl—and let the painting evolve from there. Figures dissolve into landscape, spaces flatten or twist, and forms repeat or vanish entirely. I lean into ambiguity, trusting the process to mirror the uncertainty of memory itself. The visual language borrows from artists like Joan Brown and William Kentridge, who navigate the tension between personal narrative and formal experimentation. Carl Jung’s writing on the unconscious helped me think about memory not just as a personal archive, but as something archetypal—shaped by symbols, emotions, and repetition. Alongside the paintings, I created a small zine titled The Possum Story: A Family Classic, which retells one childhood memory through multiple versions, highlighting how narrative shifts depending on time and perspective. While the zine grounds the project in language, it’s the paintings that carry the weight of memory—fragmented, emotional, and open-ended. Together, these works ask what happens when we stop chasing the truth of the past and instead engage with how it continues to echo. I’m not painting what happened—I’m painting how it felt, how it changed, and how it continues to resurface, distorted but still alive.