Max Cleary

October 13, 2017

Crushing Sensation is a one night exhibition of new images and sculpture by Max Cleary that is rooted in the relationship between the industries of residential development and film production.

I’ve had a long standing fascination with the built world and its relationship to the roles of construction and labor within art and film making as well as how both industries are ultimately the business of the spectacle. In both cases the spectacle is a point of culmination as well as what is being sold to us; it is the holy grail. Development and real estate depend wholly on the finished structure. Without it there is nothing to desire, build, market, sell, or have. Film making occupies a more open space where a finished, physical thing is not necessarily its end point. Instead, it is the viewing of a film and the experience one derives from it that make up its apex.

The work in Crushing Sensation is about the structures and equations under girding these two industries of spectacle. Each piece uses the visual languages of contemporary modern home design and stage production to generate fictional spaces in perpetual states of incompleteness. Similar to behind the scenes documentation, they offer a view into a skeletal architecture where notes and tools meant only for the crew’s eyes are left unhidden and the tableau is forced to fight with its own process for the spotlight. It is an investigation of how the things that affect us are made and the effects of a constructed authenticity.

Stage 3: 150 Tons of Silent Air, archival pigment print, 24″ x 36″, 2016

www.max-cleary.com