Hadley + Maxwell

Vancouver-based artist team Hadley + Maxwell build a tension between politics and aesthetics, reflecting on issues of taste and its historical construction. Deleted Scenes, their solo exhibition for the Contemporary Art Gallery, formally plays out a series of absences over six new works. Each piece contains something of nothing. Some works do so humorously, as in the video installation Language to be Looked at, where Hadley nonchalantly throws objects at the back of Maxwell's head. In Conspiracy the artists' anthropomorphize two pedestals, dressing one up in an oversized hand knitted balaclava and casting the other as Johnny Rotten. Other works carry a more sober resonance. Promise, a twenty-two foot pole, waving a white flag at half-staff conflates symbols of surrender and mourning. But all the new works fail at being nothing or, at the least, point to failed attempts to form nothingness.

Biography

Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens began working collaboratively in 1997. They graduated together from Emily Carr Institute the following year, and in 2004 co-wrote a thesis on collaboration to receive their MA from the European Graduate School. Switzerland. They have exhibited work across Canada, in the United States and in Australia, most recently in group exhibitions at the The Liane and Danny Taran Gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal and the Vancouver Art Gallery, and solo exhibitions at Western Front, Vancouver and Howard House, Seattle. Their work has been included in publications such as Beauxarts, Canadian Art, Prefix Photo and Public. In 2005 they became the first collaborative recipients of a VIVA award.