Sorry We Missed You

Max Gavrich’s photographs are unquiet. Often picturing still objects—a near-empty plastic sack of water bottles, a plug protruding from a wall, a string wrapped around telephone wires —the photographs nevertheless exude a muted restlessness, a liveness. Sunlight streams through the distended plastic, turning it into a glistening membrane. The taped cord makes a wound in the face of a Greek statue, its pixelated image distorted by the textured surface of the wall. The coiled string remembers the wind that hung it there. The line between thing and body, animate and inanimate matter, is strangely blurred.

Necessary Inventions, 2021, dimensions variable, archival pigment prints in rubber-dipped steel frames.

Necessary Inventions detail, 2021, dimensions variable, archival pigment prints in rubber-dipped steel frames.

Gavrich took several of the photographs on a cross-country road trip with a childhood friend. In one, their car sits in an empty, featureless field of scrub grass, his friend asleep on the roof. The sites Gavrich documents—a window filled with the licking tongues of snake plants, a listing heap of cinder blocks, a tree split by lightning, a graffitied-out sign—have a similarly anonymous, could-be-anywhere quality. Each is drained of any motion, as if the very air inside the image had congealed. Each image combines particularity and placelessness into a kind of dreamscape, utterly unreal and yet entirely ordinary.

Warm Up (Impossible Dream), 2021, 36 x 52 x 46" (dimensions variable), steel arm wrestling table, marine polyvinyl, spill mats, mechanical tablet arms, iPad.

Each photograph’s frame is coated in blue rubberized paint, the color and texture of which recall the sweat-wicking polyvinyl fabric used to cover gym and physical therapy mats. The simultaneous evocation of physical strength and physical vulnerability finds echoes in Gavrich’s photographs of spaces of male bonding and masculine performance. Hands wrapped together and tied with bands, arm wrestlers square off in what might be combat or might be an embrace. Another male figure, seated on a sidewalk, is at once alone and not, his companion’s presence marked only by the shadow that falls across his chest. A short film records the backstage practice of a young Elvis impersonator, learning the ritual gestures and rote choreography of canonical American manhood. There is a loneliness to his absorption, to this quiet, intense practice for an invisible audience. He sings softly to himself, the words too low for us to hear.