Matt Scobey: Case Study Selected Works 2018-2025

Born in Danville, Illinois in 1979, Matt Scobey received a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Colorado State University. After college, he worked as a studio assistant for artist Ray King in Philadelphia before spending many years in Denver working primarily in graphic design, illustration and publishing. Scobey participated in and contributed to all levels of the Denver art scene from DIY warehouse spaces and commercial galleries to working with Denver Art Museum, Public Art Denver Arts and Venues and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Since 2018, Scobey has been living and working in Marfa, Texas, utilizing an underdeveloped lot as both studio and  exhibition space.

Scobey creates works, installations and furniture that invite curious interaction. Responsive to public space and everyday materials, Scobey’s work experiments with how to frame the encounter in projects that range from sculptural interventions in a grocery store or a cardboard living room where museum goers can relax from social media to high design objects reconceived with Arte Povera materials. His studio practice often results in stacked  sculptural work – in concrete, stone, wood, cast acrylic, neodymium magnets and cast earth – that transmit and reflect natural light dependent on where the sun is located in relation to the viewer and the work. His work explores material energy, transmission, site, form and scale.

In May of 2024, Poydras Corridor Polyhedra, a towering figure of four stacked sculptural pieces by Matt Scobey, was installed along the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition (PCSE) presented by The Helis Foundation. Made of aluminum, steel and cast acrylic, Poydras Corridor Polyhedra is the tallest sculpture on the Poydras Corridor today.

The idea for Poydras Corridor Polyhedra began as a series of studio studies in geometry, scale and form. Scored paper was used as form for slip casting small concrete hexagonal antiprisms, cuboctahedron, truncated pyramids, rhombicosidodecahedron, dodecahedron and square antiprisms. Various Platonic and Archimedean solid forms were designed to share a common face dimension or corresponding plane which would allow the pieces to be stacked vertically. Transparent cast acrylic was then cut to match the shared dimension and placed in between the geometric elements of the work. These small works acted as models for possible public or monumental works.

Poydras Corridor Polyhedra was fabricated in New Orleans from bent framed welded aluminum and cast acrylic. The polyhedra shapes are a mix of Platonic and Archimedean solids, or cosmic solids. The cube represents earth, octahedron represents air, tetrahedron represents fire, icosahedron represents water, dodecahedron represents the universe.