by Brian Slattery | Nov 5, 2019 1:47 pm

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Posted to: Arts & Culture, Visual Arts, Downtown

Maxim T. Schmidt‘s This Is Not an Exhibition — running now at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art through Nov. 10 — may seem at first like a nod to Rene Magritte’s surreal classic, This Is Not a Pipe.

But in another sense, it’s genuine. Tucked away in a corner of the Ely Center, it’s something to stumble on. It’s a collection of artful trash. It’s a story. It’s a contradictory thing, and Schmidt wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m very intuitive,” he said. “I make better things when I don’t think about them too much.”

The 23-year-old Schmidt started the pieces for This Is Not an Exhibition with bins filled with scraps from magazines. His grandmother had given him plenty to work with — about 2,000 magazines ranging from 1890 to 1980. “I started dissecting all those,” he said, especially the older issues. “I’m always drawn to imagery that’s unfamiliar to me.”

In Of God, the first piece he made for the show, two images that caught his eye were a photograph of a memorial wall from a religious service somewhere in Latin America, with the faces of departed loved ones all pinned to a wall so densely that they seemed almost tiled. Another photograph was of an insect collection, the specimens pinned to a white background. There were clear formal similarities between the two images — the patterns of light and dark — encouraging the eye to make comparisons between them if put side by side.

“It’s almost offensive how blunt it is,” Schmidt said. But it also raised questions for his inquisitive mind, about how we practice religions, how remember people, and in a broader sense, how we construct meaning out of a world of people and things. “I’m drawn to overwhelming, complicated images,” he said. “You have a lot to look at, a lot to dig through.”

Schmidt’s artistic sensibilities were shaped starting in childhood. He grew up in Meriden, but followed his father, an “antiques person,” to the enormous Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield, Mass. He was collecting old photographs at the age of 12. He went to Albertus Magnus and graduated with a degree in art therapy and now lives in New Haven, where he works at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art.

He also put a lot of himself into his art.

“I’m a queer artist,” he said, and has been “for as long as I can remember” (he identifies as trans-masculine). He’s thus “influenced by camp. Make things complicated. Make them fun. More nonsense, less clarity — because I think you can find a lot of clarity in that.” He was also drawn to contradictions. “I love that,” he said with a laugh. “I’m a hypocrite, you’re a hypocrite — whatever.” There was, perhaps, wisdom to be found in exploring the contradictions rather than eliminating them. “It’s autobiographical in that it reflects how I am, how I exist. I attach that sort of meaning to it — being genuine, and needing to be genuine.”

That brought Schmidt back to the multitudes of images in his grandmother’s attic, “among dead squirrels, and now it’s artwork.” After that first piece, Schmidt kept working on “this garbage-y kind of thing,” finding meaningful questions emerging in the juxtapositions of found images. He reached a turning point several pieces in, where working by intuition yielded a deeper understanding of what the project was about — the search for a kind of meaning among things that have been discarded, and what that can tell us about the ways we construct meaning throughout our lives.

The latest piece Schmidt made, Gnikcuf Lufnis, was “my favorite,” he said. “It’s definitely somewhat erotic, playing with ideas of sin.” It was in some ways his clearest statement yet about the effects of religious and moral institutions on the way we bring meaning to our lives — and the hypocrisies and shortcomings in both the institutions and ourselves.

Also, he added, “I’m also just a sucker for a good yellow. I’m so much about color. It’s so bad.”

So Schmidt reached the point where intuition gave way to an understanding of what the current project was about. Some artists might think of all the pieces before Gnikcuf Lufnis as research and development, and the next series of pieces would make for the exhibition. For Schmidt, though, that would be leaving out “the story” — “something about figuring it out by not figuring it out. There’s no stop and go to discovering what meaning is.”

“Fluid and hypocritical,” Schmidt said of the exhibition. “I’m OK with that because it’s how I am as a person.” He looked around again at the materials, the detritus, he’d used to create the pieces in the show. “There’s a lot of things you can do with it,” he said. “Look at all the things I made art out of.” The images ranged across the past century. “I’m just lucky enough to bring it to my timeline.”

This Is Not an Exhibition runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Nov. 10. Visit the Ely Center’s website for hours.