PROJECT: SANDMAN

Hadley & Maxwell

January 17 - February 15, 2003

PROJECT: SANDMAN was a collaborative, site-specific installation work that involved the re-decoration of the home of Artspace Director, David LaRiviere. The project began late in the year 2002, when two Vancouver-based artists, Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, sent LaRiviere a disposable camera with explicit instructions to take photographs of the interior of his home and then send the undeveloped film back to Vancouver. The artists also included a survey requesting specific information about the Director’s residence, which ultimately gave the artists the data they needed to begin planning their project.

Hadley & Maxwell arrived in Peterborough the first week of January and began the task of re-decorating the Director’s home, responding spontaneously to the interior environment but at the same time, basing their final decisions on several pre-determined criteria. First, their project would involve an unconventional and often humorous reorganization of objects, which would ultimately emphasize or re-frame the art and decoration already present within the space. During this process, objects would be reorganized according to random or unconventional structure, spaces previously unattended would be activated, and those commonly seen as dominant visually would be de-emphasized.

Two main themes seemed to evolve out of this process. On his completed survey, LaRiviere had indicated that if he could own any three pieces of art in the world, one of them would be, without a doubt, “Der Sandman”, a film installation created by the Vancouver artist, Stan Douglas. Hadley and Maxwell took this information to heart and created a delightful scaled-down desktop movie set model of “Der Sandman”, which was placed on David’s bedside table, presumably as inspiration for “dreaming” about owning the “Sandman”.

LaRiviere’s survey and photographs had also indicated that he was passionate about, and actively involved in creating progressive and experimental music. This music theme manifested in the Director’s living room, which was magically transformed into a rave event, complete with stage, state-of-the-art turntables, extraordinary lighting, balloons, and a myriad of other wild and thought-provoking objects.

Upon completion of the re-decoration process, Hadley and Maxwell collaborated with Sven Boecker, an architectural photographer, who professionally documented the transformation of LaRiviere’s home. The negatives were subsequently developed and enlarged to 30” x 40” format and then framed. These six exceptional photographs were exhibited at Artspace from January 17 to February 15, 2003.

So, what was the point of all this? Was this project just the manifestation of a bizarre fantasy of two artists who happen to have considerable decorative arts experience?! Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The artists themselves, state that the purpose of this site-specific installation work was to address the “cross-over between fine and decorative arts, public and private spaces, taste and authority, and alternative spaces for installation outside the gallery”. Therefore, the artists’ intention was to prove that the so-called boundaries separating these areas may not be as black and white as we might think.

Sekoiaa Lake
February 2003