Eileen Maxson
“I got an e-mail from [Arthouse director] Sue Graze asking me to call her, and I knew that I had been nominated, but when I called I thought that it was a mistake or something,” recalls the 25-year-old Houston artist. “So I called her back, and she told me I was one of the finalists, and I was really surprised. And happy.” Maxson works primarily in video, using images to challenge viewers’ perceptions of the media. For the Arthouse exhibition, she developed a new video installation titled Grand Opening.
“My original idea was something similar to an amusement park ride, having to do with movement of a line and the controlled experience of a ride. The things that I was interested in were theatrical design, like set design. When you go to Disney World or Disneyland, it’s all kind of a set: fabricated and all the scaling is wrong – I think it’s seven-eighths scale. So that’s something I incorporated into the piece.
“The other thing that really influenced this work is the grand opening of the Texas-sized IKEA in Houston the first week of August 2004. When thinking about the idea of the Texas Prize, I started to think about what that means and also to incorporate how I see the landscape of Texas, which in Houston even more so than in Austin is strip malls. Where I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, every single building looks exactly like the building that I made in the gallery. With the IKEA opening, I saw some people camping by the side of the freeway, and what was interesting to me was what the setting is when you’re between I-10 and a furniture store, but these people had real experiences, like a church service. They had a community that came out of this commercial experience. There are all these different dynamics that went into it, like the woman who won had camped out on the side of IKEA in August in Houston for eight days. And IKEA was really humane about it. They pumped power to people, so people had air conditioning and televisions and PlayStations and stuff like that. It wasn’t like Hands on a Hard Body, where it was all about how much you could endure. A lot of these kids were from high school and didn’t go anywhere for their summer vacation, so this was kind of their vacation, their way of doing something out of the ordinary.
“Two things that I was thinking a lot about in the design process were the collapsing of three dimensions to two dimensions, like when you’re looking at the front of the piece there’s actual depth to it, you can walk into it, but on the sides it collapses into the wall, and if you stand on the side of the piece, you can’t discern where the art ends and the wall begins. Also, I was thinking a lot about dream sequences and acceptance speeches, because, going back to the IKEA grand opening, the woman who won ended up giving this kind of impromptu acceptance speech for a television camera, thanking her family, and something about it seemed surreal, like it wasn’t really happening, it was this dream she was having, so that’s something I tried to achieve with the way you walk into the piece and the way it collapses is very dreamlike. When you walk into the window, though, you have to deal with this combination of a dream world, which is the piece, and the real world, which is outside the window.
“Ultimately, it was the way that I envisioned it, but it was much more complicated than I thought it would be. I’ve done one other installation, but I don’t have any building experience. I had a lot of help from the crew at Arthouse. A friend of mine was helping me the day we decided to use sheetrock. I had no idea how to do it. So that was kind of the process for the whole piece, coming up with an idea and not really knowing how to do it and solving the problems as you go.”
This article appears in October 21 • 2005.