by Fiammetta De Michele.
Dreamshow or Doomshow? Christian Holstad & Max Hooper Schneider together for the first time in an imaginary digital dreamshow.
Lately i’ve been shocked by the news that a Japanese fisherman reeled a monster fish, mutated by the radiation contamination from the Fukushima nuclear accident. I can’t even start to make a list of all the environmental tragedies that we’re facing, from climate change to extinction of species. Two contemporary artists from California meditate about this apocalyptic scenario.
Christian Holstad, is interested in the culture of consumerism. In his 2010 show at Schmidt & Handrup he presented The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A series of luminous sculptures, presented in large scale.The title of the exhibition draws attention to a phenomenon first described in the 1997.
The remains of our consumer garbage, mostly plastic parts and their decomposition products, gather in vortexes in the oceans and accumulate to significant concentrations in certain maritime regions of so-called‚ trash vortexes or Plastic islands. The most famous among them is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific, with an estimated expanse of twice the size of Texas.
Max Hooper Schneider is interested in biomarine science and he uses a fictional-narrative approach that reveals a doom vision of the future.
His works came from a fantasy future where the human specie doesn’t exist anymore and animals occupy objects. The final result is a hybrid of organic matter and machines. His artwork Lab Matters 2 , is a life-sized glowing Beluga whale skeleton cast from photoluminescent epoxy resin . I see the whale almost as a preistorical animal whose DNA has been completely modified.
Schneider used a quotation by Teodor Adorno: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” The aphorism is taken from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written by Adorno in 1941.
cover picture: from the left, Paramount Ranch 2, Max Hooper Schneider, Scarecrow, 2010, light sculpture, 200 x 60 x 20 cm, Christian Holstad, Pet Semiosis 3: Cholera (Cyrillic), Max Hooper Schneider
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