Artist Snapshot: Maggie Haas (Part 2 of 2)

On the eve of Auntie Em's Mobile Home, we caught up with Haas to talk a little more about the exhibition. 

What did you want to capture with the Auntie Em's Mobile Home project? 

Paul Hopkin, the curator at Slow, titled the project after we'd been making work for a while.  I am based in San Francisco, and for a number of reasons I wanted to play with working small and portable.  It's partly just a matter of practicality for an out-of-town show, but I'm also considering the ways I use and consume materials in for an art practice.  I make sculpture, and a lot of my work has to do with the uneasiness and fragility of built environments and domestic space.  Care and upkeep of spaces, like homes, possessions, etc. gets folded into that and sometimes it occurs to me that my own practice produces quite a bit of superfluous-feeling material.  Not that art isn't important, but in terms of resources it doesn't tread lightly.  So I wanted to see if smallness could produce some efficiency and at the same time, a sense of care and intimacy.

What do you hope people will get out of coming to the exhibition? 

That's partly summed up in wanting to created that intimacy I just talked about, but what I'm most excited about is how the decisions of Paul Hopkin, the curator, will inform a viewer's perceptions.  That's something I'm looking forward to experiencing myself.

Did you work directly with TJ Proechel or was it more of an individual effort? 

I've never met TJ and it's really exciting to be paired up by a third person, Paul Hopkin, for this show.  Paul made the curatorial decision to show us together, and drew some conceptual connections ahead of time.  Once we planned out some initial things, I've been left to work as independently as I like.  But TJ's work is concerned, via photography, with some of the same strange formal moments that fascinate me.  


Don't forget to check out the Opening Reception of Auntie Em's Mobile Home from 6-9 PM TOMORROW!  


Amanda B.