seek verdana;”>In Matthew Evans’s Sleights of Hand video installation, tricks are played out in motion so slow that the viewer all but forgets to look for the method of trickery. And, were they to remember to keep looking, the method would still not reveal itself. Sleight of hand tricks have been used by sideshow hucksters, carnie rats, and drunk partygoers for something
close to forever to baffle, sucker, and impress. Evans’s tricks (and not even his tricks, but his recording of tricks for the trickery of the viewer) do none of these things. They flow endlessly in the wrong time zone, the gestures more balletic than the trick astonishing, the warped pace strangely beautiful, the flourish gestures devoid of deceitful intent.
Documentation
Artist Bio
Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans is a video and installation artist currently living and working in Toronto. In 1989 he graduated from Beal Tech in London where he majored in printmaking and photography. During the next decade he wrote and played music in the rock band The Others, releasing two albums, in 1993 and 1996. In 1998 he graduated with a combined honours degree in English and Visual Art from the University of Western Ontario and York University.
Featured in YYZINE: VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1
Photo credit: Peter MacCallum