Max Glader, Empty Sweater
Hi Hanne.
Thanks for your email. Sounds like an interesting topic.
The two works you are referring to are two collages I showed during my graduation show and the first one (in the picture) is titled ’Empty Sweater’ and the smaller work with the flip flops is titled ’Just Ignore Me”.
I have made a lot more work using the silhouette of t‑shirts/hoodies/shoes/backpack and I find that due to this bodily connection and bodily reference, size and the dimension of the piece becomes very, very important and the most immediately evident feature, like does it fit me or a bigger person, is it baby size or XXXXL?
I find imagery surrounding clothes and merchandising intriguing, especially when there is no model and the garments are seemingly ’floating’
or perhaps inhabited by some ghost. Empty clothes imply the presence of a body, which allows the spectator to as it were, ’step into’ the clothes, mentally.
Its tries to emulate a kind of voodoo doll-logic I guess, pushing a needle through a doll to make someone elsewhere feel it, or making a sweater collage and making a big hole in it.
This year in March I took part in a group exhibition and I showed a work called ’Deadstock’ which is a paper-collage of a boot/shoe out of gummy bear candies and a lot of bugs and insects surrounding it. It has a strong visual and conceptual connection to the work ’Empty Sweater’ so maybe it will be of interest for you. ’Deadstock’ refers to wholesale garment sales but the word has this more dramatic sound to it, like dead-stock, dead cattle/cow.
I think of ’deadstock’ and ’empty sweater’ to closest to the category of still life. It also has these swarms of bugs like ’empty sweater’ I wanted to push the ghost/rotten aspect of it.
Lastly the way I collage papers together is very akin to sewing. I tile the a4s together and stich them together with a continuous line of tape creating a kind of seam running across the entire image.
I hope my insights are of any value .
Warm Greetings,
Max Glader
