About five years ago, I was big into the downtown NYC party world. I was out every single night partying until the sun came up. This all seems pretty boring and stupid to me now, except that I met some really amazing people in the process. In 2007 I was out with a DJ / Producer and 1/2 of CREEP (whose new music video I'm currently in production on) and she told me there was this person I hadto meet because his work was incredible. I was down, so in the early hours of the morning I went with her to the LES. We walked up the stairs of a 3 floor building completely painted white. There were white taxidermy swans (or something I cant really remember due to my lifestyle back then) in glass cases. We walked through the door of the second floor to an all white empty room and into another all white room, otherwise covered in black graffitti, and there sat a slew of very artsy looking people all in black. Some were punks, some were transgendered, some were people that looked kind of familiar, all of them gorgeous... and at the end of the room sat Matthew Stone. It was his workspace during his stay in NYC, given to him by a gallery or something -- and even just by looking at him I could tell he was amazing. First of all he is beautiful, and carries himself in a way that I just could not stop looking at him. His british accent and excitement over making things drew me in. I was too intimidated to really sit and talk to him, plus he was in conversation with tons of people I didn't really know... but then he took us over to the empty room and turned on a projector, and he played back some of his work across the wall, which he had just filmed that weekend. I was in awe. I saw him again at a few parties, before I retired from partying, but I've continued to see his work on the covers of magazines, in popular music videos, in fashion films, runway shows and galleries all over the world. His blog "Optimism as Cultural Rebellion" is pretty amazing if you want to check out his current work, which ranges from photography to performance art to sculpture to videos. I'm pretty sure, as the years go on, he will be a major figure in the art world... though you could probably say that already. The Sunday Times recently placed him at number one in the arts section of their “Power players under 30” list.
This video, from 2007 "Untitled Glitter" was the first film I saw of Matthew Stones and it completely blew me away.
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