Review: Welcome to Max Hooper Schneider’s disturbing dystopian extravaganza
Artists are often likened to inventors or scientists, and in the case of Max Hooper Schneider the comparison is more than metaphoric. Schneider’s background in landscape architecture and marine biology strongly informs his artwork. Research and scientific investigation are key to his process. He explores the relationships between philosophy and nature, the personal and the political, destruction and construction, and what he calls nonhuman and human agents. Blending his diverse areas of expertise, his idiosyncratic sculptures, installations, and drawings challenge conventional systems of classification, suggesting a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Schneider will create a new immersive installation for his Hammer Projects exhibition, his first solo museum show.
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The Hammer Museum’s apse-like Vault gallery is put to spectacular use in Max Hooper Schneider’s show, his first solo museum appearance.
Last year, the L.A. artist included two mesmerizing aquarium installations at the gallery Jenny’s, using the hobbyist vitrines to conjure miniature consumerist dystopias, shrines to artifice and junk. His singular environment at the Hammer feels like a fleshed-out, amped-up, walk-in version of those pieces, fascinating in its alienness, disturbing in its familiarity.
In the earlier pieces at Jenny’s, fish darted among the heaped costume jewelry in one aquarium tank and crustaceans skittered across tangles of women’s lingerie in the other. At the Hammer, we are the live occupants of a curious, contrived habitat. We circle a shallow-walled island of debris as if apart from it, but the sensation is of being submerged along with it.
Schneider has built a meticulous mess of trash and downscale treasure. Every surface is dense with recognizable objects that in this context spell a mystery. Is this an alternate world or the underbelly of our own? Is this a portent of the future or a mirror to the present? The work’s title, “Transfer Station,” could read multiple ways.
There’s an upended shopping cart and a defunct pay phone. A heap of wristwatches and a scatter of pull tabs from beverage cans. A massive Raggedy Ann doll. Tangles of netting and electrical wires. A trophy, a knight’s armor, a hand vacuum and a TV remote control. Shell casings by the hundreds."— Leah Ollman, Dec. 24, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
See Hammer Projects: Max Hooper Schneider through Feb. 2 at the Hammer Museum at UCLA.
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