Max Adrian: RIPSTOP is a solo exhibition of textiles and inflatable sculptures by the Ohio-based fiber artist and recipient of the prestigious 2015 Center for Craft Windgate-Lamar Fellowship, which honors the top emerging craft artists nationwide. Adrian’s work transports viewers into artifice, desire, and world-building concepts. Drawing from rich legacies of queer fiber art and theory, including the AIDS memorial quilt and José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational text, Cruising Utopia, RIPSTOP features sculptures made from faux fur, satin, pleather, fringe, and ripstop—the show’s namesake—a woven nylon material that allows the pieces to hold air. On view are monumentally scaled works that inflate in response to the viewer.

Adrian’s use of alluring, sensual fabrics reflects the material culture of queer communities. At the same time, the handwrought textile techniques and inflatable technology he employs are drawn from his background working in a commercial mascot shop. Though many of his works are built from the scraps of those high-profile commercial characters, they—unlike mascots—interrogate consumption and capitalist desire. Informed by the aesthetics of drag, puppetry, and camp horror films, works like The Sensational Inflatable Furry Divines (2017-2019) become subversive, representing violence, repression, and the hyperstimulation of late capitalism.

While in isolation during COVID-19, Adrian’s work shifted to investigating desire and queerness at an infrastructural scale. His modernist bounce-house sculpture, A Fallible Complex (2021), continues the entangled history of inflatable architecture and utopian experimentation that sprang forth in the late 1960s through collectives like Ant Farm and Utopie. This monumental piece defies the expectations of a space designed for play and pleasure. It’s alluring, but its entrance is blocked. While its many portholes invite spectatorship and voyeurism, one would be met with a missing floor if one attempted to enter the colorful maze of interlocking levels. The structure is promising but ultimately unstable.

RIPSTOP suggests that the world Adrian desires, like queer utopia itself, is not here quite yet. It is on the horizon.

Center for Craft invites you to join us to celebrate the exhibition opening for Max Adrian: RIPSTOP on Thursday, August 15 from 5:00 - 7:00 pm!

This event is free and open to the public. Artist remarks will be at 6pm and light refreshments will be provided.

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