About
Matt Pekarek is a research-based ceramic artist. A recent graduate of the University of Southern California (2026) with a BA in Art and a BA in Archaeology, Matt uses his archaeological training to consider clay as a material and medium for historical story-telling. His work uses archival and collected material to comment on labor-related United States history. As precedent for this type of work, Matt explores his positionality as an individual with mine experience and familial labor history.
Artist Statement
Matt Pekarek is a research-based ceramic artist and archaeological consultant based in the United States. His work focuses on the concept of labor, particularly as its cultural definition continues to shift. From an anthropological perspective, labor has meant different things to different generations, from the production of one’s own goods to survive (homesteading) to the labor movement centered on workers rights and industrial greed. His work attempts to use the former to capture the latter, especially as many aspects of the labor movement go untouched in American educational systems.
Using clay, a laborious medium that has eons of history revolving around autonomous production, he uses industrial products (a potter’s wheel, modern tools, mined/produced claybodies, mined/produced glaze ingredients, and natural gas/electric kilns) to emulate production through industrialization. Careful craft (of ware and glaze) rehumanizes workers, yet the integration of geochemical materials from sites of labor strife implies exploitation, violence, and political unease that makes one question both the decorum of industry and the morality of organizers. Every work (or set) he creates has theoretical functionality, yet works for deeper symbolism alongside suspected use.
The sets he makes are created under the archaeological ethos that clay can tell a story, both as a material and through study. The ceramic object transmutes history like that of the ‘exemplar object’ in ethnography: it prompts recollection, captures time/place, reinforces memory, and provides avenues for further inquiry. This has been done already for hundreds of years within the history of ceramics; the ‘commemorative plate’ tradition has been used as blatant expressions of memory and event. Ceramics have also historically been political, like that of the abolitionist ceramic emblems/plates adorned with anti-slavery messages in the 1800s. Matt uses these historical precedents to inform his practice as it relates to the labor movement. This art is subliminal, political, personal, craft-based, and industrial.
Creating this type of work presents an interactive element to conceptual art that challenges a user’s predisposition and consumption. Functional work examining industry becomes more tactile, more personal, more intimate, and sparks contemplation outside the gallery scene. It is truer to what it represents; the used art object is dynamic, multifaceted, acts consciously, and subconsciously. It is not meant for a gallery; it is meant for people, for education, for memorial, for grassroots organizing.
As worker-capital interaction continues to be hostile, and the propriety of industries remain in flux, Matt attempts to highlight specific historical instances that have relevance to the evolving 21st century worker.