Last weekend we hosted Max Bellamy's fantastic artist's talk, with a big audience and some really good back and forth. Max kept it light and engaging, talking about his own background, bouncing around the works, and admitting that he's intoxicated with his own creative power.I've found his use of miniatures fascinating since first reading his exhibition proposal. Their physicality and abundance create so much of what intrigues me about the work, like the zooming effect of life at 1:72 scale.
Max has sourced the miniatures from all around the world. He started with local hobby shops and trademe, painstakingly painting dozens of citizens and soldiers for Silencing the lambs. Since then he's found other suppliers, including a German company who provides bags of a hundred in all kinds of clothing and poses, from a news mike operator to a woman adjusting her high heel.
These readymade components give Max's scenes more character and nuance, and provide the spark needed to draw us into the scene. It's most effective in the gallery environment work when you realise you're one and the same as the people you're looking at, and that you're participating in a scaled-up reconstruction of Max's scene.The miniatures also provide clues to some of Max's goals with the work. Looking at his factory environment, where people are inputted into a machine and spat out as soldiers, a slight mis-match in scale made me count each group. The media-industrial complex apparently has a casualty rate of one in six - not everyone makes it out alive.
Max has been documenting himself on his own website.
Microcosms has been generously sponsored by Modelcrafts and Hobbies.
Images by Kimberley Lorne-McDougall Gustavsson.
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