Years and years ago in Michigan, a young man started making unsettling dioramas and strange miniature houses in his spare time. He showed them to people. The neighbors were concerned. But what could they do? 

Later, he moved west, and made small things for motion pictures and tv shows. Puppets danced. It was a golden age. 

No longer a young man, he continues to make unwholesome creations, mostly out of wood. Saws, drills, knives, and a lathe are the tools he wields. Would it surprise you to learn he does his work in a basement? 

Now hush, the time for words is over. Just relax, give me your consent, and let the art make love to your eyes. 

Matt Burlingame is a Portland based artist.

I like maps, charts, and diagrams. There is something so official in the way they lay out the ‘truth’, which ironically, underscores the fragility and fleeting nature of human knowledge. Through arrogance or naivete (or likely a mix of the two), we strive to quantify our world in absolute terms, while standing in the shadow of the immutable truth that change is the only constant. “This is the best we could do with what we knew at the time,” these schemas seem to suggest in a charming portrayal of human patheticism (but what choice do we have?). In this light, maps take on the same temporal relevance as a “wet paint” sign on a park bench: paint dries, and boundaries shift (assuming the boundaries were ‘accurate’ to begin with).
To cut apart these globes initially seemed irreverent, but there was something that was incredibly freeing in the deconstruction and reconstruction process. Cartographic authority was supplanted by the beauty which lies between order and disorder. Rigid truths gave way to a voice which haphazardly declared, “We are imperfect, and yet perfectly wonderful.”