The Art of Obsession: “Matt Pleva: A Matt-rospective, 1975–2025”

At the Cornell Creative Arts Center in Kingston, a half-century of imagination sits under glass—inked, collaged, and sometimes cleverly mechanized. “Matt Pleva: A Matt-rospective, 1975–2025” gathers decades of work from the Kingston-based multimedia artist—some of it drawn in the backseat of his parents’ car, others meticulously assembled inside the shells of vintage videotapes. It’s not just a retrospective—it’s a family archive, curated in part by his mother, who began saving his drawings when he was a boy fixated on GI Joe vehicles and the Challenger space shuttle.

“I’d come home after school, drink milk, eat pretzels, and draw the same thing over and over again,” Pleva recalls. “My mom would marvel at how I’d obsess on the details—every tile on the shuttle.” What began as a child’s fascination with precision has since evolved into an artistic philosophy: the beauty is in the detail, and the detail is endless.

Pleva came of age during the golden era of pop culture—Star Wars, Top Gun, and Saturday-morning cartoons. He drew what he saw—spaceships, fighter jets, movie monsters—and never stopped. His mother’s early collection anchors the show’s first section, a gallery of childhood drawings that foreshadow his adult work’s meticulous, densely cross-hatched style.

He traces that cross-hatching obsession back to watching PBS’s Mystery! as a kid. “It was the Edward Gorey intro,” he says. “Those wobbly, obsessive lines—that’s what got me.” From there, he devoured the gothic inks of comic artists like Bernie Wrightson and Frank Miller. At SUNY Purchase he studied art formally, then spent a decade working as a jeweler, honing the same microscopic precision he brings to his drawings and dioramas today. “Miniaturized, exacting detail—that’s where it all connects,” he says.

Worldbuilding in Miniature

Pleva’s art often lives inside something else: a VHS cassette, a matchbox, an ear gauge, a travel clock. His ongoing series of dioramas—tiny, elaborately engineered scenes housed in vintage objects—recasts pop culture and cinema as delicate mechanical curiosities. “It’s world-building,” he says. “Like designing storyboards and props for a film that only exists in my head.”

The spark came, fittingly, from a video store. “I always wanted one of those red VHS copies of The Hunt for Red October,” Pleva says. “Years later I finally got one on eBay. I stared at it for months before realizing I could build inside it.” His first attempts were done with Betamax tapes—smaller, with a single viewing window—and soon he was engineering entire micro-theaters that moved and sometimes spoke. One version of Swimming to Cambodia includes the full Spalding Gray monologue on a hidden MP3 player. Another, for The Hunt for Red October, features two pop-up periscopes operated by a tiny wheel.

The tapes demand both artistry and mechanical intuition. “You have to hollow them out to make things move in and out of frame,” he explains. “The visible part might be small, but the real work is inside—cutting, wiring, hoping it all fits. It’s all prayer and trial and error until it works.”

Pen, Ink, and Rules

If the dioramas show Pleva’s playfulness, his drawings reveal his discipline. His signature black-and-white pen-and-ink landscapes—streetscapes of Kingston, gothic cottages, dreamlike city blocks—combine comic-book energy with technical precision. “To the untrained eye, they look like perfect architectural renderings,” he says. “But they’re not. I make them up as I go.”

He calls his technique “painting by numbers without the numbers.” Every stroke has a rule—how much to shade, how much to leave white. Around 2008, he settled into what he considers his mature style: a visual language of crosshatch, shadow, and rhythm. “I built this vocabulary of shading,” he says. “Smoke has a rule, rocks have a rule, bricks have a rule.”

Color appears sparingly. “The paper I like doesn’t forgive watercolor,” he says. “You get one shot before it starts to break down.” Instead, he punctuates his monochrome scenes with metallics—gold leaf, silver ink—that gleam like found treasure. “It just makes the piece pop,” he says. “Like the silver in the White House drawing—it’s a way to elevate the image without drowning it in color.”

Every Pleva piece hides a small white moon. It’s both signature and symbol. As a child, he was fascinated by Al Hirschfeld’s habit of hiding his daughter Nina’s name in his caricatures. “The moon is my version of that,” he says. “It connects the work, but it’s also the only true white I ever leave. Everything else gets shaded or altered. The moon stays pure.”

The moon has become an organizing principle—a compositional anchor that draws the eye and sometimes backlights a crucial detail. “There’s a Moby Dick piece,” he says, “and without that white moon behind the harpooner, he’d just vanish into the ink.”

Horizontal Dreams

Much of Pleva’s work stretches wide and narrow, cinematic rather than painterly. He credits this to the comic-book shop he haunted as a teenager. “That’s where I first understood letterboxing—why movies looked the way they did,” he says. “I realized widescreen felt more natural, more true to how I see.” His compositions unfold like film stills, storytelling through framing and sequence. “Vertical just feels like stacking images,” he says. “Horizontal lets me create a narrative flow.”

That cinematic logic carries through to his dioramas: miniature screens that project memory, myth, and movie lore. “There’s always some sense of story,” he says, “even if it’s only a story of how the thing works.”

Commissioned Obsessions

Half of Pleva’s current output is commission-based, ranging from private murals to bespoke dioramas and jewelry. “Some clients just say, ‘Do your thing,’” he says. “Others are incredibly exacting—they’ll do historical research on the buildings they want depicted.” He tells the story of a client who asked him to reconstruct a vanished street from archival photos. “He knew more about the architecture than I did,” Pleva says. “But I learned a lot. Every job adds to the bag of tricks.”

Still, the most personal pieces are the ones that stay—or the ones that got away too fast. “Some of the dioramas I finished hours before mailing them off,” he says. “They go to a show, and I never see them again. It’s a good problem to have—but still, a little sad.”

“Matt-rospective” is as much a testament to artistic persistence as to maternal foresight. From a boy obsessively penciling space shuttles tile by tile to a grown man wiring motion sensors into VHS shells, Pleva has built a career out of paying attention—to craft, to culture, to the quiet pleasure of getting something exactly right.

He laughs when asked if he ever tires of the precision. “No,” he says. “Because that’s where the joy is. The labor is the joy. You get to lose yourself in it. You get to build a world.”