Hadley+Maxwell

Skies of the Heart, 2012
Wood, copper and tin lamps crafted by artisans in Ourika valley and Marrakech, sound, love songs and poetry, black lights, acrylic flourescent paint, cushions.

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Singers: Fatima Belkouch, Rime Mrini, Peaches, Etel Adnan, Sandra Hrabluik
Production assistance: Samya Abid, Salima Hadimi, Abdel–Ouahid Grmah, Marie Egger
Construction: Hicham Gounan, Abdeljalil Akhchane

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Minarets, synagogues, and steeples bridge the earth and the heavens and elevate the voices of Muezzins, Hazzans, and bells that call us to prayer. Skies of the Heart is a sculptural Detournement of these structures in the form of scaffolding and housing that protects and amplifies voices of women singing love songs. Scaffolding is both a useful and an ornamental structure; it forms a ladder that brings us closer both to the heavens and to our work, and it also forms the temporary face we see while something is in a state of renovation. Here it supports modified lamps that act as bodies that emit both light and song. The songs of devotion emanating from the lamps come from the tradition of Medieval lyric poetry, and address an earthly beloved and a Sacred Beloved interchangeably. Sung in multiple languages and originating from as long ago as c. 1160 and as recently as 1990, these songs imagine and express religious devotion to an earthly subject and earthly devotion to a religious subject. The scaffolding, lamps and wooden limbs also express this relation between the earthly and the divine; they are structures of utility that exist in service for others and, at the same time, virtuous objects in their own right.

Hadley+Maxwell have been collaborating since they met in Vancouver, Canada, in 1997, working in a variety of media including installation, sculpture, video and sound. Stemming from their commitment to collaboration, their work examines mediation as the threshold between the individual and the social. Their recent body of work, titled Improperties engages with a history of the decorative arts and its reluctant relationship with conceptual processes of categorization. Their writing and image-based projects have appeared in publications including the Fillip Review, Art Lies!, Public, C Magazine, West Coast Line and F.R. David. Recent solo exhibitions include The Lemonade is Weak Like Your Soul, Kunstverein Göttingen (Germany, 2009), Improperties, Smart Project Space (Amsterdam, 2010); “who can resist a Human? who doesn’t finger lies?”YYZ (Toronto, 2010); and Who that Happens, Or Gallery (Vancouver, 2011). Recent group exhibitions include Invitation to an Infiltration, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver); Manifestation Internationale d’art de Quebec, (Québec City); Kurt, Seattle Art Museum; and It’s the End of the World as We Know It, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France, (all 2010); The Bell Show, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin; Light in Darkness, Western Bridge, Seattle; and The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam (all 2011). Hadley+Maxwell are represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto, and are based in Berlin, Germany.

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