For several years I've been writing about film in addition to architecture. I'm not a fan of Hollywood blockbusters, or even most Oscar winners, but I'm especially devoted to local underground work with passion, imagination, and an absence of formula. And Matt McCormick has long been one of my favorite local filmmakers.
As it happens, Matt's artwork and his outlook have a decidedly architectural bent. His most acclaimed film, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, was a half-mocking, half-serious look at how Portland's system of painting over graffiti has created, however unwittingly, a series of abstract works across the city that even seem to recall the style of legendary abstract expressionist Mark Rothko (a former Portlander, by the way). Another of McCormick's films, Towlines, portrayed these workhorses of the waterways against a backdrop of majestically gritty local industrial enclaves.
Matt has now started a blog of his own, and many of the entries respond to architecture in Portland and on his many travels. In a post from earlier this week, he expresses a fascination with abandoned buildings. "An abandoned building is a place that represents a failure or a retreat," he says."Maybe it is that tragic mystery that intrigues me. I like old, historic architecture, but I have to admit that I have little interest in newly renovated buildings. I'll take a photograph of a run-down building from the 1950's over an immaculately restored building from the 1890's any day. Renovation scrapes away more than just the leaky roof and layers of old paint. It scrapes away the mystery, and scares away the ghosts."
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