Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Christian Maychack: Host, an exhibition of new sculpture. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Maychack’s new body of work utilizes the bio-linear structure of tree branches as forms to build upon. By following the branches’ structure and shape, he applies and builds new visual systems onto them. For Maychack, the desire to use the branches arises from human beings natural compulsion to continually and arbitrarily reorganize their surroundings.

In a sense, this is Maychack’s preceding body of work flipped on its head. Usually, earlier works were anthropomorphic forms escaping from, or acting as parasites on existing structural and architectural hosts. His new sculptures employ a natural form as armature for the man-made, eschewing the illusionistic in favor of a process that is open and revealing.

In Crossover, the largest work in the exhibition, a six foot branch spreads horizontally, elevated with MDF supports and partially encased with Magic Sculpt and thin dowels. A simple organic form is carefully preserved and embellished for presentation. Organizer climbs vertically, a branch wrapped in and by a swirled gray casing and supported by a shelf-like section. Here, the marbleized Magic Sculpt mimics the characteristics of real marble, while the constructed shape references a type of functional home fixture.

The sculptures call to mind man-made architecture and building processes, but they also evoke natural structures such as wasp nests and ant mounds. Maychack’s work serves to remind us that we too are organisms and that our cultural artifacts are extensions of our own biology.

Christian Maychack received his MFA from San Francisco State University in 2002 and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008. He has had other solo exhibitions at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco and the Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland. Maychack’s work was included in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach and his sculptures were featured in Bay Area Now 4, a group exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.