Scavenger

In a darkened laboratory behind the anonymous storefront of a dispossessed upholstery shop near the Inglewood Oil Fields, a maverick scientist-maker works frenetically amid glowing uranium mushrooms, electric aquarium specimens, postapocalyptic dollhouses, and malformed ikebana. 125 Newbury is proud to present his findings in Max Hooper Schneider's Scavenger, the artist's first solo exhibition in New York. Hooper Schneider, who lives and works in Los Angeles, has cultivated a polyvalent practice, fusing a poetics of sculptural assemblage and material technology with a critical examination of ecological, philosophical, and social systems. Trained in both art and science, Hooper Schneider fashions intricate and often chaotic sculptural dioramas and installations that draw on scientific principles and tenets of everyday culture to explore dynamics of transformation, hybridity, decay, and succession. Hooper Schneider's work often involves synthetic ecosystems and novel, unborn ecologies oscillating across site and scale. He constructs dense microcosms teeming with coral, teeth, crystals, plasma gas, craft store detritus, and fictive life forms--contained within vitrines or made habitable in outdoor sculptural environments. At 125 Newbury, a giant Oreo cookie oozes oil into an archipelago-like pond of cadaverous copper-plated stuffed animals. Nearby, an agglomerated mass of barnacles is embedded with miniature LED screens playing videos of burning sculptures. A nocturnal forest of trash and discarded objects is populated by glowing, lantern-like opioid pill capsules, while burned and mutilated aquaria are reborn as fossilized reefs of coruscating copper dendrites. These works evoke natural history displays altered by speculative fiction and post-human aesthetics, challenging traditional boundaries between the natural and the artificial. The artist describes his exhibition at 125 Newbury as a "set of conditions without a plot," likening it to "an anthropology museum set in the distant future." Weaving together both new and pre-existing works, the exhibition is a means for investigating loss, the passage of time, and the artist's signatory procedures of material evolution, preservation, and decay. For Hooper Schneider, art functions as a space, both physical and conceptual, for breaking down the binary between nature and culture, the living and the dead. Operating in multiple registers simultaneously, from absurdity to melancholia, from environmental collapse to ethereal regrowth, Hooper Schneider leads us on a 'guided misinterpretation' of our present moment, interrogating how imaginary artefacts produce a fantasy of a bygone Anthropocene. At its core, Hooper Schneider's practice challenges the dualistic thinking that underlies the conventional categories in which we classify artworks. His works operate in liminal and interstitial zones, the in-betweens where life and death, nature and culture, order and entropy intersect. There stands Max Hooper Schneider. Empathically undidactic, the artist describes his work as "a living, phantasmatic landscape" composed "of niche material technologies and the aleatory structures of wastelands and destroyed environments." Immersing viewers in these unsettling, otherworldly biotopes and vistas of endless seeing, Hooper Schneider's exhibition at 125 Newbury makes palpable fundamental questions of resilience, mutation, and the speculative futures of ecological and cultural systems in an age of crisis. Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) graduated from Harvard University in 2011 with a master's degree in landscape architecture. The foregrounding of material technologies and tactics of defamiliarization within the fields of biology, philosophy, landscape architecture, and varying subcultures continues to inform his polymathic practice. Hooper Schneider's work develops and explores the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through the creation of habitats and installations that materialize and dramatize nature in diverse ways, with nature conceived as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. The resultant work voids the difference between the natural and the artificial, challenges conventional systems of both scientific and artistic classification, upsets valuations of high and low culture, and suggests a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Obsessive travel, documentation, field work in distant regions, and the sacrificing of his own material compositions to environmental elements remain integral to his codex of artistic procedures. He continues to experiment across institutions, venues, and outdoor sites locally and internationally and is held in major public and private collections around the world. Hooper Schneider lives and works in Los Angeles.

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