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Matt McCormick (and Tess!) In Tribune
Filming on empty
Road-tripping artist likes it best when there's no there there
by Joseph Gallivan
Matt McCormick has long been fascinated by abandoned buildings and ghost towns.
In 2005 he was on one of his periodic drives from Portland to Santa Fe, N.M., when he challenged himself to find the town called Santa Claus in Arizona.
"I had these fantastic home movies my grandfather shot in the 1950s with my dad and his younger brother just hanging out, checking it out," he says in a recent interview in his studio on the Willamette River.
To his surprise he found Santa Claus, abandoned and peeling but not yet bulldozed. He filmed the town, then intercut it with his grandfather's footage and mailed a DVD of it to his dad in Maine as a Father's Day present.
"He got really into it," McCormick says with a modest smile.
READ MORE at PortlandTribune.com
