Machine Dazzle’s "Obsession and Evidence" at AP Space Gallery
What if the remnants we discard every day like buttons, beads, broken figurines, fragments of synthetic fabric weren’t just waste, but the bones of a new mythology? In Obsession and Evidence, artist and performer Machine Dazzle reimagines the overlooked and the discarded, transforming trash into relics and forgotten materials into storytelling devices.
From January 1st - 15th, 2025, Gallery AP Space presents Machine Dazzle’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York City. Known for his bold, immersive costume and set designs, Dazzle now turns his focus inward toward materials themselves and outward toward the cultural obsessions that define and discard them.
Born Matthew Flower in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Machine Dazzle is no stranger to reinvention. A former art director, singer, songwriter, and performer, he’s perhaps most widely recognized for his costume design in Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In Obsession and Evidence, his studio at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City becomes both laboratory and archive. For over four years, Machine Dazzle has collected donated objects, scraps of past lives, and now fuses them with contemporary technologies, including AI-generated imagery, to explore the collision between nature and artifice, memory and machine.
This exhibition follows his recent show Soft Serve at Wasserman Projects in Detroit, as well as his first solo installation Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Here, though, the work becomes more tactile, more fossil-like. These aren’t costumes to be worn on stage—they’re totems, remains, dreams in plastic and polyester.
Rather than shy away from spectacle, Dazzle dives into it. On opening day, he led a costumed procession through Chelsea’s gallery district—an act that was both celebratory and ceremonial. Each costume, like each sculpture on display, tells a story: a reverence for camp, a resistance to conformity, and a reverent grief for what society too quickly throws away.
Machine Dazzle’s pieces are not minimal—they are maximalist rituals, imbued with care and contradiction. A wig might become a wild creature; a synthetic flower, a fossilized bloom. There is humor here, but also haunting—an unease that arises from seeing what we consider garbage become sacred again.
In Obsession and Evidence, Dazzle poses an unsettling question: what happens when non-biodegradable waste becomes part of our natural landscape? His work doesn’t preach; it exposes. By embedding everyday junk into sculptural forms that mimic ancient relics, he reminds us that future archaeologists may study our time through plastic fragments and costume jewelry.
This isn’t nostalgia—it’s documentation. By incorporating AI into his creative process, Dazzle not only extends the materials' lives, but rethinks their origin stories. His digitally generated images suggest artifacts that never existed, but could have, as if conjured from a lost civilization that worshiped color, kitsch, and chaos.
“Obsession” refers not only to the cultural compulsions Machine Dazzle critiques—overconsumption, identity performance, novelty—but also to his own passionate dedication to his craft. “Evidence” is what remains. The exhibition is a forensic site of forgotten things, arranged not as trash but as truths.
Obsession and Evidence is not just a commentary on waste—it’s a reclaiming of it. Machine Dazzle doesn’t offer clean solutions or simple metaphors. Instead, he invites you into a glittering, chaotic conversation between past and future, trash and treasure, decay and divinity.
As our world becomes increasingly mediated by technology and mass production, this exhibit dares to suggest that meaning still lies in the material. That even our discarded objects have stories to tell—if we’re willing to listen.
