Press

Congratulations to Team Macho, who were featured in the Arts section of The National Post today. The article, written by Ben Kaplan, is centered around the process behind the collective's upcoming installation project with the AGO entitled AXIS MUNDI.

Here is a small portion of the article: “A big part of our process is we don’t believe in too much process,” explains Stephen Appleby-Barr, 30, of Team Macho, a collective of four artists well known on the Toronto scene. In their piece for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Axis Mundi, the task was to explain the artist’s workspace. “We take a subject and extrapolate on it,” explains Lauchie Reid, 30. Axis Mundi translates roughly to the pillars of the universe, and the group used Northrop Frye’s Words With Power as a starting point.

The Canadian academic’s masterwork features four stages of artistic creation: the cave, the furnace, the mountaintop and the garden. “Frye used it to decode the Bible and since we mythologize everything we do, we found a connection,” Reid says. “So we were going to talk about the mythology of space, but everything else was up in the air,” says Nicholas Aoki, 31. “If we hadn’t been working together for eight years, we’d probably be freaking out.”

“There’s a great sense of wanting to do something else.” Team Macho says their original reason to approach a work is when they feel a calling. Conversely, when that calling fades — or when the deadline approaches — the piece is done. “You’ll see works of ours where a hand or something maybe isn’t finished and it’s like, ‘Whoops!’ But at the same time, it felt right,” Appleby-Barr explains. Axis Mundi is an interactive exhibit, where museum-goers can actually enter the four spaces and, according to Reid, the piece won’t be done until that interaction occurs. “There comes a time when a piece isn’t asking for anything else,” he says. “At that time, the piece is no longer ours. It belongs to whoever’s experiencing it. That’s when we get to see what we’ve made.”

» Read Full Article on nationalpost.com

*Photo taken by Peter J. Thompson / National Post