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| Christian
Maychack created "The Long Goodbye" specifically for
this show.
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Christian
Maychack: Chances Aren't
Details: through August 16
510-484-4373 LuckyTackle.com
Fri.-Sun., 1-5 p.m.
Where: At Lucky Tackle Gallery,
6608 San Pablo Ave, Oakland |
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From
the Week of Wednesday, August 6, 2003
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Theater
Et
Tu, Condoleezza?
Dick Cheney orchestrates
a power grab and war on Canada in the Mime Troupe's
latest installment.
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Like
a jumble of dry bones languishing in the desert, Christian Maychack's
eleven-foot-tall sculpture installation sprawls from the gallery
ceiling, down to the floor, and out into the room. It's a huge version
of one of those toy dinosaur-skeleton models you might have built
as a kid, usually made out of light balsa wood with notches where
the "bones" fit together. But Maychack's sculpture looks like no
dinosaur you've ever seen. He cut the pieces out of GatorFoam, covered
them in wallpaper embossed with a quaint, almost Victorian pattern,
and then painted them white to match the walls. The shapes are modeled
after a motley assortment of animals; some are recognizable as parts
of hippos, rhinos, giraffes, elephants, or the occasional bit of
a human. The human pieces are the only ones that seem more or less
actual size; the artist says he used his own body as a model.
Maychack calls it "The Long Goodbye," and it's one of three new
works that he created specifically for this installation at Lucky
Tackle. The title, he says, is not a reference to the Raymond
Chandler novel, but more about "permanence, impermanence, and
life and art." It's also a fairly accurate description of the
artist's working process -- the painstaking way he whittled the
idea for this sculpture down to its bare essentials before executing
it at full three-dimensional scale. A preliminary sketch in the
gallery office shows that he initially conceived it as a melding
of this and the other large work in the show; at some point over
the course of development, he must have realized that as two separate
works, they would be much more formally and conceptually streamlined.
Since completing his MFA at San Francisco State University, Maychack
has been at Marin's Headlands Center for the Arts, where he was
awarded a post-MFA studio residency. You may have seen his work
before, either at SFSU's annual MFA thesis exhibition, or more
recently at the "Sewn Together" group show at Gregory Lind Gallery
in San Francisco. But this latest collection is much sparer than
anything he's ever done, and what makes it so remarkable is the
way it manages to be utterly minimal and yet just as intensely
alive as anything he's created in the past.
One of the other two sculptures that he made for this show (both
of which are untitled) is a huge, angular, vaguely arm-shaped
chunk of plaster that appears to have pulled away from a similarly
shaped hole in the gallery wall to rest its "elbow" on a red velvet
floor pillow. To create the effect, Maychack had to deepen the
entire gallery wall by about eight inches before digging out the
cavernous hole that the arm supposedly emerged from; he meticulously
plastered and painted everything so that no seams would be visible
between the wall and the arm. The sculpture is all flat planes
and sharp edges, but it is far from inanimate; in fact, the thing
looks like it almost might resume movement at any moment, continuing
to reach out like the slow, blind, searching tendril of a plant.
The artist describes this piece as being about the motivational
power of desire, but its monstrous size, and the clumsy way it
nearly covers the pillow it's resting on, makes it difficult to
attribute to it such tender human sentiment. It almost inspires
a twinge of fear, or at least wariness. In case it might start
to move again, we'll certainly be quick to get out of its way.
To create his earlier sculptures, which also always took on anthropomorphic
forms, Maychack often used fabric mixed with countertop laminate,
cement, live houseplants, and various other materials. The wood,
drywall, and wallpaper he uses in this latest presentation are
all new to him. Working with the wall is also new, apart from
the piece he showed at Gregory Lind, and that was very different
from these new ones, in the sense that it was never intended to
blend into its surroundings. A crazy-quilt mixture of colored
and textured fabrics, it hooked onto a protruding corner of the
gallery wall and hung down like a large snake. It was a playful
piece -- a lighthearted meditation on functionality versus nonfunctionality,
and furniture versus art.
In a sense, the new and far more imposing wall-arm piece employs
some of those same conflations, considering the way that the wall,
usually an upright structural support, has broken off into something
we might sit on, except that it seems itself to be tired, in need
of something else to rest on. It seems a little presumptuous,
even, that a white gallery wall -- usually intended to create
as little distraction as possible from the artwork -- has dared
to announce itself as an artwork and demand our attention.
It practically flaunts its own nerve, lounging on a pillow as
if it were taking a load off in someone's living room. And since
the sculpture looks like such a seamless extension of the wall,
we have to wonder where one ends and the other begins. With no
clear physical line to separate them, furniture, architecture,
and art become blurred in both definition and fact. What is in
the service of what? Which parts are decorative, and which are
functional?
Maychack's final piece in this show is a small, vaguely hammer-shaped
mixed-media sculpture mounted on the wall. It has a smooth-sanded
wooden handle, and the "head" is made from textured faux leather
with dense bunches of pins stuck into it. Like the wall-arm, which
juxtaposes drywall and velvet, this work also exhibits a playful
interest in combining seemingly disparate materials. They both
evoke useful objects (chairs and hammers) but the sculptures themselves
aren't utilitarian in any way. The artist has also imbued them
both with a kind of life force; arranged in colorful clumps, the
plastic pinheads look almost like bacterial growths. More than
just animate, they are practically pulsating with life.
There's also a kind of violence in the way Maychack has methodically
(neurotically?) stuffed the pins into the soft flesh of the leather.
So much of his art involves conjuring life, so to speak, out of
nonorganic materials, and the presence of the pins begs the question
of whether this conjuring might possibly stretch to incorporate
a little bit of voodoo. Maychack would probably recoil at the
suggestion; his focus on symbols of growth, like the plant motif
of the Victorian wallpaper, or the actual houseplants he has used
in his sculptures in the past, not to mention his obvious affinity
for comforting materials like colorful, fuzzy fabrics, definitely
point away from any kind of destructive or pain-motivated impulse
on his part. But for his viewers, who have been conditioned by
popular culture to regard synthetic life with a healthy dose of
trepidation, Maychack's work will inevitably be a little unnerving.
Call it the ghost in the drywall -- a mysterious animating force
whose intentions we can only surmise.
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