Margaret and Eliza, 2023, found rugs.
Powers of the House (tableau vivant), 2023, video, 7 hours 55 minutes. Projected for the exhibition Ambits: The Greene Fellowship Exhibition, Redline Contemporary Art Center, Denver.
Thumbscrew and the Stake, 2023, projected video, 12 minutes.
Postcards, 2023, engraved pearlescent cardstock, 5 editions of 20, photos by Brenda Magsamen.
“Max Maddox is represented in the exhibition by a suite of performance-oriented
projects that test the parameters of public space while advancing his questioning of
"inherited conceptions about what art can be," the discourse about it, and where and
how these conversations might occur. The work extends his investigation of temporary,
object-based interventions onto the surfaces of urban light posts, railings, concrete
plinths and the like that commenced in Philadelphia in 2006 and then continued in
Denver in 2021. These recent performances were initiated by his discovery of two
faux-fur rugs in a dumpster. The effort required to carry the unwieldy pair to his nearby
studio immediately disclosed their uncanny volatility and potential to be read
simultaneously as blanket, cloak, fleece, and dwelling. In addition to encouraging the
formation of unexpected personae, they elicited spontaneous interactions with
passers-by, the immediacy and authenticity of which could never be replicated in the filtered context of an institutional venue. Hauling the rugs and enveloped inside
them—with one as a mat and other as a kind of garment or tarp—generated a
repertoire of unscripted behaviors that Maddox began to capture on video as well as
still photographs, sometimes with the assistance of his friend, Brenda Magsamen. Powers
of the House (tableau vivant), 2023, presents approximately 90 minutes of footage shot
late in the afternoon on a median strip, documentation that is stretched by slow motion
to a duration of nearly eight hours. Through a gap in this makeshift shelter, the viewer
can occasionally glimpse Maddox peeking at the camera on the tripod before him but
unable to see most of the activity around him. Maddox becomes a creature, a
"caveman," an anonymous "philosopher-poet," as well as a blank screen onto which we
and the public project myriad assumptions and fears. The video includes one
exceptionally telling passage where a motorist offers Maddox two bottles of water, a
moment that hints at the scope of the charged interactions generated by Maddox's
use of the rugs, including inquiries with law enforcement that were resolved by Maddox
pointing to the camera as the justification for his activity. The time-lapse footage of
Thumbscrew and the Stake (2023), filmed during a single visit to Washington Park,
provides a more comprehensive sampling of the variety of conduct and sites Maddox
tested, including footage of him disappearing and reappearing in the crowd like the
grim reaper no one seems to notice. The divergent treatments of time offered by the
two videos complement each other while also withholding the sense of actual
durations experienced by Maddox while performing, a reminder that the real--and
irretrievable--experiences of this work occurred in the medium of the shared space of
the public commons.”
-Richard Torchia, curator of Ambits, the Greene Fellowship Exhibition
-Richard Torchia, curator of Ambits, the Greene Fellowship Exhibition