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Tim Maul’s pictures are exhausting to contextualize, largely as a result of the artist himself defies categorization. Maul has operated in and across the New York artwork world because the Nineteen Seventies, exhibiting alongside its members however by no means totally embedding himself within the metropolis’s social milieu. It’s maybe for that purpose, or owing to his fastidious avoidance of branding, that Maul by no means grounded his follow in New York like different members of his technology. Within the Nineteen Eighties, he ventured to Italy, then, a decade later, to Eire, floating out and in of Manhattan alongside the way in which.
This sense of placelessness permeates his newest exhibition, which surveys three many years of pictures. The gadgets and experiences that Maul captures—a hotel-room sconce, a greenback invoice, a cleaning soap dish— are quotidian to say the least, and he arranges them in seemingly detached diptychs and triptychs. In 07/06/78, 1978, a photograph of a calendar is sandwiched between two photographs of sunshine putting totally different surfaces, whereas Moist Hair, 1979, gives a trio of pictures that includes a phone, the again of a lady’s head, and a padlocked door. Maul’s works have all the time leaned towards melancholy, however now one additionally detects a level of sentimentality in his compositions.
The exhibition’s title, “Tim’s Ruler,” means that Maul could be angling at a tool that may lend order to his topics. In 07/06/78, the calendar emphasizes the temporality of the occasions captured within the two accompanying photographs, cementing their standing as artifacts of a specific historic second. Saturated by such reminiscences—if not nostalgia—Maul’s inflexible method to measuring the passage of time permits a fragile narrative to take root inside and between the pictures.
— Jonah Goldman Kay
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