Vertical Constructions: Dancer #1 and #2, 2012

Max Streicher - Toronto, Canada

Sculpture

Vertical Constructions: Dancer #1 and #2 consists of a pair of inflatable sculptures located at a bustling junction within the Toronto Eaton Centre. They represent bodies abstracted by speed and movement, levitating just overhead, as if frozen in an aerial pirouette. This point in the mall, with viewing platforms on several floors, is at once a point of great activity but is also a point of pause, where we can take in multiple levels of the building at once and witness ourselves as part of a complex dance of people on the move.

"My constructions are made of vinyl recycled from billboards, like the ones hanging nearby on the walls of the mall. Before I cut them up and reassembled them, this printed material was telling us how to look, what to wear and so on. Now they are just part of the dance.

In this work I attempt to fuse two art historical sources, Constructivism of the early 20thC, which reconfigured the body as a machine prepared for revolution, with wild style graffiti, which renders tags into complex, three-dimensional, interlocking forms. In my dancers I attempt to form Constructivist bodies as a graffiti artist might interpret them, or vice a versa." – Max Streicher.

Max Streicher is a sculptor from Toronto. His work has been shown at The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. He has completed site-related projects most recently in Mumbai, India, and Reims, France. He was a founding member of the Toronto-based Nethermind collective.

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Toronto Eaton Centre, 220 Yonge Street (Albert's Way entrance)

This project is indoors.