Kirk Maxson | All About My Mother
We're excited to announce our premier solo show of Kirk Maxson's work.
All About My Mother is in homage to the artist's childhood inspirations. Reared on a farm in rural Oregon by a fiber artist with a penchant for mycology, it was a life rich in nature and intertwined in the arts. This connection to nature has followed him throughout his life. Even within urban San Francisco, he finds himself connecting with nature and engaging with his neighborhood by collecting the invasive plants that thrive in the city: dandelions, mallow, nasturtiums, and geraniums. Kirk transforms them into hand patinated and embossed brass and nickel becoming an immortalized version of themselves. The branch installations are woven in steel around the found wood much like traditional weaving.
In his new show, the site-specific installations recreate the blossoming of mallows and thistles; woven branches grow in steel wire across the walls. The results are a regal homage to the everyday beauty around us, the unfailing determination of the wild, and to his mother's memory.
Maxson's preferred material is lumina copper brass, though the artist has long come to experiment with nickel, aluminum, and varnishes to help evolve his materials further for his vision.
You can manipulate the metal in ways you can manipulate paper. I can draw on the veins, and I can hammer it out; it's the silversmithing process now. -- Kirk Maxson
Kirk Maxson moved to San Francisco in 1992, and lived in the Mission participating in the San Francisco Mission School art scene. He exhibited artwork in the seminal exhibition spaces of Adobe books, Ascena, and ESP during the height of the Mission School. Maxson has created multiple permanent site-specific installation for corporate collections including Genentech Inc., Morgan Stanley Corporate Collection, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Collection, Kilroy Realty Corporation, Avant Corporate Collection, Fresh Connection Corporation, UBM, and ClimateWorks Foundation. Kirk received his BFA from UC Santa Barbara and currently lives and works in San Francisco.
