L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
A scending Size
B OO K 3 . Ma x St re ic h er
SIZ E DO ES MATTE R
size matte does
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
M ax St re i c he r A s ce ndi ng Si ze
Reco l l ect ing S e n s ati on of B re a th
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
“Scale is one factor. My giants, for example, are intended to overwhelm. �
p age
02
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
M ax St re i c he r A s ce ndi ng Si ze
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
03
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
04
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
M ax St re i c he r A s ce ndi ng Si ze
Bio Name : Max Streicher Age / Sex / Nationality : 55/m/U.S.A About : Max Streicher is a sculptor and installation artist from Alberta, now residing in Toronto. Since 1989 he has worked extensively with inflatable technology in kinetic sculptures and installation works. He has shown widely across Canada in solo exhibitions. He has been part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Power Plant Centre for contemporary Art, Toronto and Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
05
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
“ For some, gasping for breath, endlessly straining to rise, portray an image of playfulness, and even resurrection, while for others it is distinctly an image of torture. ” O ver v i e w Max Streicher is a sculptor and installation artist from Toronto. Since 1991 he has worked extensively with kinetic inflatable forms. He has exhibited his work across Canada in numerous public galleries and artist-run centres. He has completed several site-related projects, most recently in Venice, Siena, Stockholm and Erfurt, Germany. He was a founding member of the Nethermind collective of artists which organized four large exhibitions in alternative spaces in Toronto between 1991 and 1995. Inflatables have had an important place in my work since 1991. In most of these sculptures and installations I have used industrial fans and simple valve mechanisms to animate sewn forms with lifelike gestures. My use of light and papery materials, like Tyvek (and more recently nylon spinnaker), has been significant to the character of their development, specifically to my focus on movement. The weightlessness of this material allows it to respond with surprising
subtlety to the action of air within it. I use air to animate my work because it provides an effortless naturalism. It not only looks right, it feels right, recollecting our sensation of breath.Inflatables are the medium of enchantment, fantasy and optimism, but things do go wrong. Take the Hindenburg, for example. Macy’s Parade balloon characters occasionally crash into the crowd. In my work the distress behind the whimsy takes different forms. Scale is one factor. My giants, for example, are intended to overwhelm. In contrast to similar commercial counterparts, they are out of control. They appear to struggle, but why and to what end? However that sense of disruption is read also depends on what the individual viewer brings to the work. For some, gasping for breath, endlessly straining to rise, portray an image of playfulness, and even resurrection, while for others it is distinctly an image of torture. Both cases however involve physical empathy, a bodily recognition of the elemental—powerful and tenuous—forces that animate us all.
p age
06
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Floating Mans Nylon Spinnaker & Helium Balloons Figures 7meers tall
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
07
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
08
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
M ax Stre i c h er Floating Mans Nylon Spinnaker & Helium Balloons Figures 7meers tall
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
09
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
“ I use air to animate my work because it provides an effortless naturalism. �
p age
10
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Floating Mans Nylon Spinnaker & Helium Balloons Figures 7meers tall
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
11
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
12
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Floating Mans Nylon Spinnaker & Helium Balloons Figures 7meers tall
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
13
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
In ter v i e w
What happens to the works you create? Do you build them and simply leave them to their fate? Do you ever revisit them to see how they’re doing? Like parents with their kids, most artists don’t like to choose favorites when discussing their work. But looking back, do any specific Little
I leave all the figures behind after I photograph them. To be honest, I prefer not to know what hap-
People projects spark, let’s say, fonder memo- pens to them after I leave. Many are probably destroyed — stepped on, swept away — but for me, it’s ries than others? far better that their fates remain unknown. It feels
Springtime in Palestine was great to shoot — it wasn’t the most elaborate, but it was a real experience to cross over the [West Bank separation] wall, and it wasn’t at all like I expected it to be. We just
right, somehow, that they really are lost. You work under a pseudonym, rather than your real name. What, if anything, is the benefit of re-
wandered around for a few hours, and no one both- maining anonymous as an artist?
ered us at all apart from taxi drivers. That section of the wall runs right alongside a cemetery, which was sad to see. And up the road, pretty much hidden, is a gift shop that sells photos of graffiti from the wall to the one or two tourists that happen to stumble
to remain anonymous because what they are doing is often illegal. Mine isn’t — in fact, I get hassled far more for using my camera in areas where it is sup-
on it, run by this very chatty guy. All very bizarre.
posedly restricted than I do for sticking down my
As for some other memories: to shoot in Moscow, I
have just always worked under a pseudonym. I will
had to lie in the snow for half an hour and couldn’t feel my hands after I finished. I went back to check on History in Berlin later in the day, and someone had taken the cigarette that had been stuck to the top of the miniature plinth but left the rest of the installation intact. Strange. The hardest place to shoot was Marrakech in Morocco. People would always want to see what I was doing as I lay on the ground to make pictures, which is a totally different experience than in a city like, say, London, where people tend to ignore you whatever you’re doing.
p age
14
For some artists working outdoors, there is a need
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
figures. I don’t specifically try to be anonymous; I often meet people at events that feature my work, or talk to people if they ask me what I am doing in the street, but I prefer that people think about the work and the characters in it, rather than the person behind it.
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Alto Cumulus Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans each cloud 305 x 610 x 300 cm
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
15
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
16
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Alto Cumulus Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans each cloud 305 x 610 x 300 cm
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
17
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
18
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Clounds ( Left : Whole, Right : Detail) Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans 9.75 x 9.75 x 7.5 meters
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
19
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Writer’s bio Name : Melanie Townsend Sex / Nationality : f/US About : Melanie Townsend Colvin has been creating her entire life. Growing up in Arkansas and she was surrounded by creative influences that fueled her imagination and helped shape her early work. Travel, formal education and artists workshops have developed her unique visual language that she uses inher art today. Melanie is inspired by nature and the juxtaposition of man-made objects agains natural materials. The many years she worked in advertising and graphic design environments have strongly influenced her fine art.
I nqu i re All things are transmutable, we learn as children: anything can become something else and every place can be somewhere else. Objects can be animate: independent lives can be created in toys, images, and abstractions. Mysterious presences, experiences of extraordinary scale, transforming characters and demons -- these are the very content and fibre of the dream and nightmare world, spectres that pursue us throughout our lives. The imaginary life of the child, and the fears and fantasies of the adult, are connected by a common capacity for physical joy and the awareness of physical frailty. In his development of the inflatable as kinetic and interactive artwork, and in his other multimedia installations, Max Streicher has created images of our greatest joys and our deepest terrors, the site where the imaginary lives of children and adults meet. Drawing on imagery from literature, mythology, and the Bible (Streicher studied theology before going to art school) his work provokes strong spontaneous, psychological reactions in people of all ages and backgrounds -- reactions that run deep and reveal insights into the socially constructed ego. A dream was the source for an important early work by Streicher entitled We Will Name This Place..., 1988 (fig. 1). In the Winter’s College gallery at York University in Toronto Streicher removed a large section of ceiling tile to reveal the building’s inner structure. Through this opening he installed three pâpier-maché gargoyles -- dogs that appear to be charging from the sky. The figures are a hybrid of Streicher’s childhood dog, George, and gargoyles seen by the artist on the cathedral in Swäbisch Gmünd, Germany. Gargoyles, in the Middle Ages, were put on the outside of buildings to ward off ghosts and malicious spirits. Dogs may be associated with the hunt or the fear of being hunted. The same icon can be a benevolent sign, however -- a messenger, a pet, or a companion on a spiritual journey. Streicher used the gallery’s acoustic ceiling panels as a metaphorical skin, standing for the separation between interior and exterior, conscious and subconscious realities.
p age
20
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Clound Land Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans 27 x 6 x 7.5 meters
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
21
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
p age
22
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
23
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
“ Max Streicher has created images of our greatest joys and our deepest terrors, the site where the imaginary lives of children and adults meet.
�
p age
24
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Cloud Land Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans 27 x 6 x 7.5 meters
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
25
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Ma x S t rei c h er Sleeping Giants Tyvek, vinyl, electric fans each figure 7.5 meter
p age
26
L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
Max Streicher / Ascending Size
Exhi bi t i on I n fo r m a t i on LACMA is delighted to announce exhibition SIZE DOES MATTER by various artists including urban artist Slinkachu. “…some twelve billion years ago the gods created the universe, including the [...] dinosaurs and such like, but after a while found these huge creatures rather tedious [...] Turning from gigantism to miniaturism, the gods then created little creatures on earth, including humans...” Shapiro & Bennett, The Politics of Moralizing, 2002. In turn, Slinkachu, the arch miniaturist, has placed his 1:87 scale installations in a city that is, from the perspective of the Little People, a Concrete Ocean. Or is it also a concrete ocean from our perspective? We city-dwellers often feel that sense of being overwhelmed by the urban environment, we empathise with the vulnerability of the Little People – not least as they are abandoned by their maker either to be trodden underfoot by a careless passer-by or to startle a less careless one. We laugh at their barely significant perspective on life, their diminutive world view and sharply reflect that perhaps ours is equally narrow and our lives are just as insignificant. Teetering on the edge of the metaphysical abyss, the dry, ironic wit draws us back to laughter. After all, a proud podgy man on a tennis ball in a puddle as big as a lake, who really thinks he is a god as he surveys the view and his pretty wife does not know that he has been entitled The Last Resort. Looking at these photographically recorded installations one has the impression of zooming in and zooming out. One feels close to the situation and distanced from it. Slinkachu has seemingly reversed his usual process: he has seemingly uprooted paving stones and parts of pavements and brought them into the gallery. The figures stick to these urban islands, oblivious that the boundaries of their world are so limited. Oblivious that they will float forever on the concrete ocean that is their (and our) home.
page L A C M A / S IZ E D O E S M AT T ER
27