ILLUSTRATIONS

DEMONOLOGISTS W/ JUNKO HIROSHIGE “NURE-ONNA” CD AUGUST 2022

Matt Minter is a Lexington, KY-based countercultural polymath known for music projects (as vocalist and conceptual mastermind behind the noise-rock outfit Wretched Worst), video production, and, perhaps most notably, illustration work. Regardless of medium, his collective creative output mercilessly taps the same singular vein of darkly humorous psychosexual horror tableaux.

“TALES TO ENLIGHTEN: THE NEW TESTAMENT” PINUP MARCH 2022

Minter’s visual work employs the tropes of premium, intricately-detailed 70s international fetish sleaze and the graceless jacket art of 80s punk rock and metal albums, but subtly and deliberately reconfigures and transmutes them to inflict upon the viewer the maximum of cognitive dissonance, nauseated by his or her arousal (and, naturally the reciprocal of that). Figures loitering too near the uncanny valley to be dismissed as comic book caricatures are rendered in stark monochrome (as if to be forever immortalized in print on a bootleg t-shirt given as a consolation prize to a loser of the milk jug game at the county fair) in various states of bodily distress and ecstasy one may commonly find in a direct-to-VHS American splatter film.

“UNNATURAL LEASH” MARCH 2021

In each image, the iconography of erotica and horror are subverted in wonderful and confounding ways. Horror is indeed too weak and limiting a term for this work; what Minter plies, instead, is terror. —Written by Trevor Tremaine