Splitting, Conical Intersect, and Day's End with introduction and Q&A Jessamyn Fiore, Director, The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Do It Together: Phase II

Pallas Projects/Studios 1996-2026

Introduction and Q&A with Jessamyn Fiore, Director, The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Venue: NCAD, Grace Gifford Building, John St W, Usher's Quay, D08 H998

Drawing on Pallas’ long-running and ongoing advocacy, research and publishing on artist-run practices, the programme draws on, reflects and responds to the legacy and impact of artist-run antecedents including Gordon Matta-Clark, a pioneer of 112 Greene Street – one of New York's first alternative, artist-run venues, and co-founder of the artist-run restaurant Food. This screening of three of Matta-Clark's most significant "cutting" films follows a long-standing collaboration between Pallas Projects, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, and Thisisnotashop, which over a decade ago restaged the spirit of Food in Dublin.

Splitting, 1974, 10:50 min, b&w and color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video, documents Matta-Clark's dissection of a suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey, which he bisected with two parallel cuts and then tilted one half of the structure at an angle. The Super 8 film combines intentionally artless footage of the cutting process with images of the resulting gravity-defying structure, offering a visceral critique of domesticity and the American dream.

Conical Intersect, 1975, 19:39 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on HD video, records Matta-Clark's intervention in two seventeenth-century buildings adjacent to the site of the future Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Inspired by Anthony McCall's film Line Describing a Cone, he cut a cone-shaped void through the structures as a critical commentary on the gentrification and transformation of the neighbourhood. The film intersperses footage of the deconstruction with shots of pedestrians and drivers watching from below.

Day's End, 1975, 23:10 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video, documents one of Matta-Clark's most ambitious and controversial projects: a series of cuts made over two months in an abandoned pier on New York's Hudson River. Threatened with lawsuits throughout the process, he created shaped apertures in the steel and corrugated metal structure—a sail on the wall facing the river, a rose window on the western wall, a quarter circle on the south-east floor—which produced changing light patterns and reflections on the water. The work stands as an absurd, humorous gesture and a tribute to the stars of silent films like Harold Lloyd, while also reclaiming a lost part of the city for public enjoyment.

Presented in partnership with The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Gordon Matta-Clark films courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark is a small, private, family-run artist estate that was Founded by Jane Crawford, the artist’s widow, after Matta-Clark's untimely death in 1978 at the age of 35. In 2012 Crawford’s daughter, Jessamyn Fiore, officially joined as Co-Director of the Estate and became Director in 2025. In 2002, the Estate moved the archive of Gordon Matta-Clark to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, officially gifting it to the institution in 2011. Since 1998, the Estate has been represented by the David Zwirner Gallery. In addition to facilitating exhibitions, publications and projects about Gordon Matta-Clark, the Estate also supports the generation of new work by contemporary artists and other creatives in conversation with Matta-Clark's practice and legacy.

This event is part of Do It Together Pallas Projects 1996–2026 (https://pallasprojects.org/projects/do-it-together-exhibition)

Biographies:

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) was a seminal American artist whose radical "building cuts" redefined the relationship between architecture, urban space, and art. Trained as an architect at Cornell University, Matta-Clark rejected conventional practice in favour of what he called "anarchitecture"—an alternative use of buildings that entailed a rejection of what he termed "the functionalist aspect of past-due Machine Age moralists". His temporary interventions in condemned structures, documented almost exclusively through film and photography, constituted a denunciation not just of architecture's functions but of the American dream of progress itself.

Jessamyn Fiore is the Director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark as well as a curator and writer. She was the Director of Thisisnotashop, a nonprofit gallery space in Dublin, Ireland, from 2007-2010. She received a Masters Degree in contemporary art theory, practice, and philosophy from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2009.

Exhibitions curated include 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) at David Zwirner in New York (2011), which led to her editing the critically acclaimed, eponymous catalogue, published by David Zwirner and Radius Books (2012). She co-curated (wit

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