Artists

Stanton Taylor, Tobias Hohn

Press release

Galerie Max Mayer is pleased to announce Eat Pay Love, the second exhibition of Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor with the gallery.

For more than a decade the artist duo has been working with and through the orchestration of social spaces. Emerging from a range of project spaces, performances and institutional interventions, Eat Pay Love stands within a history of critical reflection on the social conditions of art and engages the audience to a high degree. In this process the boundaries between author and recipient are subverted in order to get a shared concept of production.

The exhibition Eat Pay Love transforms the gallery into a space where interaction, feedback, and decision-making can be experienced directly. Through a series of spatial interventions, it both enables and restricts forms of participation, shifting the roles between visitors and other actors.

The recent works by Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor take their cue from theories of learning developed in early behavioral psychology and cybernetics, where learning is understood less as a subjective phenomenon, and more as the product of predetermined environments and routine interactions. Applied across the exhibition, this logic treats the gallery’s architecture and infrastructure as active material rather than neutral support.

Mazes and labyrinths recur as central motifs. While labyrinths have long served as ritual architectures within human culture, mazes have increasingly been deployed to test and design learning processes for non-human intelligences. The works from the Reinforcement series translate these structures into collages made from newspapers and advertising brochures. They foreground a tension within contemporary information flows that appear novel, while remaining entirely ritualized. Through layering and repetition, the artists exhaust the instructive clarity of content in order to make space for another approach. 

The sculpture The Nature of Love reproduces part of a classic experiment on attachment in behavioral psychology, originally conducted with rhesus monkeys. Elsewhere, an installation of mirrors placed behind the desks of gallery staff makes their work processes visible to viewers, conjuring a situation of reciprocal observation. This strategy also extends to a barrier with an observation window that separates the gallery’s 'professional' and 'social' spaces.

Eat Pay Love invites visitors to reflect on their own path through a system of expectation and control. In reiterating the gallery’s own mechanisms, the artists also open them up to renegotiation as a social and cognitive experiment.