The Metal Drummer and the Walldog

The Metal Drummer and the Walldog is part of a series of works that focus on broadly expanding ideas of performance. The project is inspired by bulletin boards at music stores and rehearsal studios traditionally used as communication hubs where musicians can post their search for bands and bands for new members. The posts found at these public sites are a nominal portraiture, wherein an ideal band or band member is described in a few lines, some musical references, or – more and more often – a myspace address. For The Metal Drummer and the Walldog the artists have chosen a recent post by drummer Lexie Miller from a public bulletin site in Saskatoon and re-designed it to fit AKA’s public Billboard where it has been carefully hand-painted by local sign-painter Dave Smith. The process of producing the work lingers on forms of mediation between the individual and the social body. The performance starts with Miller, whose public call to find a metal band is designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibility of others who will appreciate her musicianship. The call is slowly and deliberately translated to a massive scale by the performance of Smith – a tradesman, who practices a rare craft that is rapidly being displaced by digital imaging processes. The intention is to draw out the initial call itself by extending the time it takes to perform it and the audience it is exposed to, emphasizing the craft and care of its translation and enunciation. Potential – expressed in any call, billboard or bulletin – both waits in an innate talent and becomes greater as it is performed.

Hadley+Maxwell
Artist Statement & Bio

Hadley+Maxwell work exclusively in collaboration, using the position of shared production and authorship to interrogate notions of propriety and subjectivity. They work in a wide variety of media including video, music and installation, often appropriating iconic images and traditional forms as they are expressed in pop-cultural, artistic and political movements. In previous projects they have turned John Filo’s famous photograph of the Kent State shootings (1970) into an immersive video installation involving a cover of a famous jazz standard (Gloomy Sunday, 2006), and expanded Jean-Luc Godard’s film 1+1 (1970) into a multifarious installation involving video, sound, painting, drawing, sculpture and karaoke in a perpetually looping dispute (1+1-1, 2007-). Sometimes borrowing the tastes, processes, and means of production of others, an earlier series titled The Décor Project (2002-2006) involved transforming the homes of curators and collectors into sets for installations based on fantasies of art and appearances, documenting each project photographically. Their work examines mediation as the threshold of intelligibility between the individual and the social, by engaging the relation between public and private property, history and memory. Their approach is both critical and affectionate: they critique the ideological underpinnings of making meaning while celebrating the desire this represents for a sense of belonging.

Hadley+Maxwell have been working together since 1997 when they met in Vancouver, Canada. Since then, their investigations into cultural history, contemporary philosophy, and aesthetics have taken the form of conceptually driven works in a variety of media including video, installation, and photography. Their writing and image-based projects have appeared in publications including the Fillip Review, Art Lies!, Public, C Magazine, Prefix Photo, West Coast Line and F.R. David. Recently, their work has been included in exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (São Paolo); Kunstraum München; Taipei Fine Art Museum; Power Plant (Toronto); Montehermoso Cultural Centre (Spain); and the National Gallery of Canada. Upcoming activities include solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, and YYZ, Toronto. Hadley+Maxwell are currently based in Berlin and are represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in Toronto.

The artists would like to shout huge thanks out to:
Tod Emel
Dagmara Genda
Dave Smith of SignSmith
Lexie Miller
All of whom were intimately involved in the production of the work. And
Cindy Baker,
who put forward the original invitation.

The artists would also like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $17.1 million in visual arts throughout Canada.

Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada,
qui a investi 17,1 millions de dollars l'an dernier dans les arts visuels à travers le Canada.

Rock n’ Roll Ethics as Style
by Dagmara Genda

Since their 2007 Berlin residency, Canadian art power couple Hadley + Maxwell, have dealt with the aesthetics of music—most specifically rock n’ roll. Their Berlin project, 1+1-1, was a multi-media installation examining the ethics and aesthetics of rock rehearsal through a re-presentation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil or One Plus One, as the director’s cut is known. For AKA, the duo worked with Saskatoon subject matter albeit at a distance from Worpswede, Germany where they recently relocated. The project was seemingly simple. I was charged with the task of photographing publically posted advertisements looking for vocalists, instrumentalists or entire bands. Then I was to e-mail the photographs to the artists who would redesign the ad and have a sign painter transpose the image onto AKA’s and Paved Art’s newest shared exhibition space—a massive billboard covering the entire second floor of the gallery’s façade. However, things did not quite work out as planned, although you would not guess it by the finished product. . . . more