Struts Gallery’s Open Studio artists, Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens have arrived in Sackville for the month of June with plans to incorporate existing local areas and practices into work during their residency.

Hadley and Maxwell - they prefer the use of their first names - are graduates of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver where they met and began working collaboratively. Over the past seven years they have continued to work together, concentrating on the area of installation art, producing work which has received attention in the national media

This is the artists’ second visit to Sackville, having exhibited at Struts in 2002 when the Gallery hosted an installation of their work entitled Intimate Desert . Hadley and Maxwell’s work has often represents notions of our culture in various thought provoking ways. Their recent work continues in the same vein but evolves with their interests.

While in Sackville they will continue work on an ongoing series of interior installations, The Decor Project , which take place in private homes. Including works in Vancouver, Peterborough, Winnipeg and Montréal, the project has taken the two artists across Canada, and will continue in Sackville with a seventh installation at the residence of a local artist and active Struts member, Linda Rae Dornan. The project takes place in a single room in the private home, similar to the numerous interior design programs popular on television, however, Hadley and Maxwell take the idea of redesigning the room to a different level; they utilize the existing conditions of the individual’s room and create an area which uses the personality of the person to create a work which intertwines a subjective representation of the individual into their piece of work. The concepts which are attached to a person’s individual space and the fact that a work of art is constructed in and around this space creates a certain contradiction in relation to the nature of creating art for public display, while also creating an effect similar to current decorating shows; a private space being used as an area of public interest and focus.

Their second project begins a new body of work investigating the realm of representation and meanings attached to the uses of sounds and language. In Sackville their interest focuses specifically on the practice of bird calling. By venturing into this new area of exploration the artists hope to develop an understanding of the various relationships which are created through the bird calling practice, whether for hunting, birding or research purposes. Hadley and Maxwell have been interviewing and working with local volunteers who have an enthusiastic interest in birds and the use of bird calls. By identifying the different reasons why people participate in bird calling the artists’ objective is to learn more about what individuals gain from applying it as a language. While collecting this information, Hadley and Maxwell will work progressively towards a finished product which draws their findings together in a video and photographic portrait of the practice and the practitioners of bird calling.

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