EXHIBITIONS: Christian Maychack: A General Record of Things Breaking Down
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Christian Maychack: A General Record of Things Breaking Down
22 May – 30 June, 2007
Artist Reception: Thursday, June 7, 5:30-7:30 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery
San Francisco-based artist Christian Maychack constructs small- and large-scale sculptural objects from a variety of materials, challenging the normative relationships between object, space, and spectator. His pieces are often suggestive of functional objects, such as furniture, body parts, and building elements-but they also act as esoteric signifiers of abstract processes and physical gestures that can be continually reinterpreted.
Through a process that combines traditional sculpture with images that draw inspiration from evolutionary processes and 3D computer modeling, Maychack creates anthropomorphic pieces that appear to bubble through space with no fixed identity. Materials such as wood, drywall mud, gator foam, resin, Styrofoam, and latex paint routinely crop up in his work-in permutations that are simultaneously literal and allegorical, playful and sinister, disorienting and familiar.
In his site-specific "architectural interventions" and free-standing sculptures, Maychack uses building materials such as molding and lumber in combinations that subvert the works' structure and intended function. Maychack spends a great deal of time in the locations that the pieces will inhabit before crafting the pieces themselves, many of which appear as tumor-like growths that emerge organically from the spaces. In this manner, his works arise from the very collapse of function, and appear as discrete objects on an endless search for purpose.
According to Maychack, "I'm interested in taking these highly structured things and making them seem as if they're broken down or collapsing on themselves, but growing at the same time." Accordingly, his pieces can be seen as process-oriented objects that chart a route from blobby primitivism to coherent masses bathed in their own identity, emotion, and intelligence-and existing in a mysterious transformational gap where they are constantly in the state of "becoming."
Christian Maychack was born in upstate New York and lives and works in San Francisco. Maychack obtained his MFA in Studio Arts from San Francisco State University. His recent solo exhibitions include All the Slow Forces, Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York, NY, 2006; and From an Ocean of Subtle Collapse, Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland, 2005. Group exhibitions include Exit Music (for a Film), Grimm Rosenfeld Gallery, Munich, Germany, 2007; and the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, 2006. Distinctions include a 2006 Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, as well as a 2005 Residency at the Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland. A permanent site-specific sculpture for UCSF at Mission Bay is planned for 2007. This is the artist's second solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery.