Maccabee Shelley

The shape of a thing and the guts of a thing. What makes the thing the thing? Use or function (or forgetting)? How does any industry keep-pace with its own rates of production, its own languages and populations? Its own timing, its dissociations and lags?

Or, the different language of space/time: of the way phases of objects and technologies generate specific kinds of irreplaceable (but reproduceable?) relations, pleasures, desires. That’s what disappears or sublimates into obsolescence, that way of talking. Those speeds or paces of connection or communication. And they might not even evolve (like a technology itself), they might just be replaced, substituted, subtracted, exchanged, transacted-on. And all for the sake of faster, faster, fastest?—everyone’s always saying at the prime rate of the market. Instant items. But not talking…. There’s a necessary lag there, an unavoidable waste of time. A functional forgetting.

Or a sense of humor that’s also a sense of loss and despair. But only as much as the connections to other people that these objects use to hold. The (melancholic) precariousness, fragility, and vulnerability of objects, technologies, systems—and the impossibility of any industry keeping-pace with its own rate of production, its own languages and populations.

Born in Los Angeles, Maccabee Shelley studied environmental and Earth sciences before earning degrees in studio art and ceramics. Intrigued by the perception and projection of value and obsolescence, Maccabee translates refuse through various materials and processes exploring the space between object, image, and experience. Works by Maccabee have been exhibited in: “spleen iiiii” (Reisig and Taylor Contemporary: Los Angeles, California); “Junque Show” (Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California); “Power of Ten” (Steve Turner: Los Angeles, California); as well as numerous other group shows and projects in Los Angeles and Northern California (where he currently lives and works).