Private View Friday 23 January 2026, 6–9pm

Matt’s Gallery is pleased to announce Automated Fantasy Procedure, a major new commission by London-based artist Joe Moss. Moss is a recent MFA Graduate from the Slade School of Art, this is his first institutional solo exhibition, supported by The Foundation Foundation.

Working across video, sculpture, and performance, Moss examines how contemporary culture fragments and accelerates fictions. Utilising interrelated elements that recur across screens, objects, and spaces, his works often pivot around staged moments that reveal the constructed nature of his images.

Automated Fantasy Procedure continues and expands Moss’s engagement with what theorists Leila A. Villaverde and Roymeico A. Carter describe as ‘the proleptic’: a collapse of past, present and future in which fiction, reality and ideas of progress fold into one another. This collapse in time seems increasingly familiar, and Moss encounters the idea with a broad approach, contrasting contemporary and ancient materials and techniques, alongside a large palette of references and cinematic devices. In Automated Fantasy Procedure, Moss seeks to situate this temporal slippage within the recursive loops and referential efficiency of contemporary networked culture.

Continuing a legacy of site-specific production central to Matt’s Gallery’s programme since the 1980s, Moss has taken up residence at the gallery from November 2025, developing the work in the space.

Moss is working with synchronised palm-sized research drones, looping videos, aluminium section, obsolete 3D printers, salvaged electronics, miniaturised sets and green-screen filmmaking techniques blending the virtual and physical spaces of the work.

In preparation for this work Moss has filmed at key sites of digital infrastructure, including a Westmill Wind Farm Co-op and near GCHQ Bude, where undersea data cables surface in the UK. A shooting script featuring a rotating cast of spectral figures—loosely drawn from characters such as Mrs Dalloway, Don Quixote and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog —has been written and will be shot at the gallery.

Automated Fantasy Procedure aims to create a haunting, feedback-laden environment—an exploration of how bodies and technologies move through, and are moved by, the historical systems that structure contemporary life. The result promises to be a layered, self-reflexive system in which images, bodies and infrastructures continuously refer to and reshape one another.

This is the first in a planned ongoing annual series of exhibitions curated by Deputy Director Tim Dixon supporting a recent graduate with their first institutional solo exhibition.