Tape artist Max Zorn ‘unbound by time and place’
Dutch artist Max Zorn uses an unusual technique of creating pictures by cutting and pasting pieces of packing tape.
At an exhibition of his work in Singapore he told the BBC about the inspiration for his work, and how he creates images “unbound by time and place”.
Original Video: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-36136475
Subsection: Entertainment & Arts
Published: 26 April 2016
Max Zorn: “Hi, I’m Max Zorn and I’m a tape artist”
[Music, camera panning over Max Zorn’s artwork during AAF Singapore]
Max Zorn: “inspiration is actually really tricky to grasp. It’s more like this tingle in your guts. It starts as this faraway little melody you want to take and explore, and compose something around.
[Camera follows Max Zorn to a lightbox where he creates an artwork live]
Max Zorn: “What happens is the combination of adding layers of tape to make parts darker. This is 7, 8, 9, 10 layers, and then it gets really dark. And what I also have to do is to use my scalpel and cut parts out. If I cut on the second layer, I really have to cut so carefully that I only cut through one layer and not hurt the layer underneath, and that is when the challenge starts.
Max Zorn: “I was always a fan of street art. I always liked the idea of displaying your art within the context of a city. I think it’s very immediate, its very connected to a location, to the people there. But I felt there was one aspect underrepresented and that was street art at night. So, before I even started working with tape was the idea to create artworks that work with all these millions of city lights.
I feel I’m not bound anymore to certain periods or certain characters. But what I do instead is basically taking elements of different eras and combine them. If you look closely to the more complex artworks, they have cars from the 50s and 20s in one picture. But they blend together, so you wouldn’t realize it at first glance. I don’t want to be bound by boundaries of time and place but I want to create my story independently from all that.
I like the way movies tell stories. I try to compose similar narratives. When I watch a movie, I’m not dissecting the movie but rather breath it all in and then, as an echo later on, something will get stuck in my head, and that’s when I start build my own story around it.