scratching raises hives

scratching raises hives
Noël Morical & Max Byron Garett
March 28 - April 18, 2015

A hive first conjures a colony of bees. We’re programmed to think of all aphorising associations like industrious production. Perhaps a bee is closer to a cell or an organ than a creature. Perhaps the hive is the beast. Like all beasts it has its majesty, its domain, but it also has fragility and clumsiness. Creatures are perceived in displaced and fabricated contexts. Zoo. Rooftop garden. Calendar.

Hives scratched into being are a different kind of colony. An overreaction of the body’s defenses. A tiny little architecture propped up to defend a swath of skin from something that was never threatening in the first place.

Noël Morical is all tied up in knots. Each knot is a whole thing that has a name and technique. Together they stand as a unit, as a body or as a home. History, as in the stories of battles and victories, teach the knot tying. Macrame is the craft of sailors between the hotter moments. Preparation. A repeated action that memorializes. Spanish sailors picked up the practice from moorish conquests. A long history of embellishment.

Max Byron Garett harnesses a different vocabulary of embellishment. Tsotckies. Function as a unit more than on their own. We’re accustomed to horses belonging to herds, so they are both the group and the individual, but Max is rewriting the hierarchies.

Color and too much color. We don’t have very good ways of saying this, but taste is forgiven the great warrior or athlete. The shoes or uniforms of our greatest tend toward piling too many of our most intense and synthetic color ways. Funny where the cycle meets. The most reviled, the marginalized, and the poor share the visual markers of our strongest and most revered. Too much, too loud, too shiny. 

We posture as though we always know the difference. Difference between an individual and the larger identity. Difference between good taste and bad. Between fierce and fierce. Noël hovers and Max ducks under, but they each hold their own somewhere between the rules of the game.