Matt Donovan (CV) was born in Toronto in 1974, and is a graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design. His art world contributions include his collaboration on the Robotic Chair with Max Dean and Raffaello D’Andrea, which has been shown at many venues including ARS Electronica, ARCO, IdeaCity, Luminato, the National Gallery of Canada, and is the subject of a short film by Peter Lynch.
Hallie Siegel (CV) was born in London, Ontario in 1974, and is a graduate of Concordia University’s Communication Studies program.
Matt and Hallie are grant recipients from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and have lectured at the Ontario College of Art and Design. From 2007-2009, they lived in Zurich, Switzerland, where Matt was Artist in Residence and Hallie worked as a communications consultant at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. They now live and work out of their studio in Toronto.
Our Collaboration
Our collaborative began in 1999, around the time we were finishing our respective degrees in Fine Arts (Matt) and Communications Studies (Hallie). At that time we were not yet making art together, but we were talking intensively about it. Mostly we talked about the ways in which communication theory bled into art theory and back again. Eventually our conversations fused into ideas for specific artworks, and we began creating a series of pieces we called “History Machines”.
We think of our pieces as artifacts of our conversations; they are what emerge from many hours of tossing ideas back and forth. One of us will come across something interesting … maybe an historical text … maybe an aesthetic idea, and will present it to the other, who, in turn modifies it and gives it back. Eventually threads of many interrelated conversations are woven together into a single, synthesized concept. We iterate, reiterate – doing research, drawing sketches, building models, and pushing the idea and each other – until we are both satisfied with the result.
As our ideas are conceptualized, and the narrative of each piece becomes clear, we begin physical production. Matt brings an intuitive sense of 3-dimensional space and an in-depth knowledge of materials to our collaboration. Hallie brings a sensibility of the 2-d in the form of text, typography and graphics, as well as a passion for history and literature. We enjoy playing off each others’ strengths, and our best work is a seamless blend of our contrasting skill sets: 2d and 3d, text and sculpture, narrative and gesture. We know a piece is ‘finished’ when we can no longer see the lines that distinguish Hallie’s work from Matt’s and vice versa.