Make Contact With Your Life
by Max Baynes
Exhibition: April 11 - 15, 2023
Reception: Friday, April 14th, 6pm - 8pm
This body of work is a transition, a chrysalis for my mind and my hand to begin letting go of artistic preconceptions so that I may embody the connection I have to material and place. The place is a country landscape in Bethany, North Carolina. The land I grew up on is dotted with machines and shelters that house many things and simultaneously engage with nature in a visually synergistic dialogue. This place brings me comfort and vitality. Many of the objects within these sculptures are sourced from my father’s collection, or from my own which is the result of inheriting his mantra, “that might come in handy one day.”
More About Max:
I make art to satisfy urges in my body. It most often manifests in sculptural forms; however, I allow myself to take advantage of any medium that I feel will help channel that inner sensation. Everything comes back to the body because everything comes back to sound, my first love. When I am constructing, I calibrate my focus through what I am hearing and seeing. I use that focus to guide my hands toward finding relationships of materials. The lines and separations between marks are often reminiscent of sound for my eye, a certain obsessive measurement, a reverence for rhythm, a schematic of my mind. Sometimes the sound can be an arrhythmic wind blowing through a building packed floor to ceiling. The stacks of objects can play Ravel’s Bolero for my eyeballs. It is all in service of the search for poetry, the search for elation that reverberates so strongly up my spine that it makes me weep and dance at the same time.
This body of work is the beginning of a new connection to place and self. My sculpture has always drawn heavily from Modernism, and now I am starting to filter that influence through a lens that feels more directly related to my being. As I am constructing these works, I feel I am revealing myself to myself in a deeper way. A quasi-pastoral aesthetic that gives way to a combination of comedic absurdity and entropy is an important facet of the imagery I make. I see the decay as a potentially uplifting thing, however, because I am curious about the engagement between nature and synthetic objects. Seeing the natural world as an embodied system in dialogue with our stuff is what I am working towards. I am building my identity through a mindful awareness of this dialogue that simultaneously digs for the poetry in a sometimes chaotic human experience.
