Maxwell Dunn – Artist – Something From Nothing

Something From Nothing – The Recycled Art of Gregory Maxwell Dunn, by Dean Giagni

Max Dunn is reclaiming a house in North Albany the same way he reclaims materials for his artwork; by using things he’s found, things he’s repurposing and things he’s improving. Working in construction, he finds a lot of his materials on job sites and in old buildings. “Throughout the day I’ll find materials that are going be thrown out. Junk, old parts. Anything that’s nice and smooth to paint on. A lot of this is old weathered Luan and it’s starting to just kind of fall apart. And it kinda adds to that feel like someone would nail it up on the street. And it would eventually just deteriorate. That’s what I like. Stuff like that.”

Every room in his house is hung and stacked with large paintings in various stages of completion. Circling above them in his living room is a beautiful HO scale train set he’s rescued. He’s built a series of shelves for the track going around the wall close to the ceiling so the train can run completely around the whole living room. He climbs onto a chair and powers it up to show it off to me proudly. Then he shows me a train car he’s tagged with his own graffiti tag – DBAR. “I want to get my friends to do their own tags on different cars, and then I’ll have a whole train of them.”

Max says graffiti and skateboard culture had a big influence on him growing up. “I did travel a few times to Philadelphia. I had a friend who lived down there. We went down there and skated. FDR Park, under the bridges. Even just going down to visit Philadelphia, some of the streets there had mosaic tiles and murals. I definitely got a lot of inspiration from that.” Those mosaic walls were by noted Philadelphia folk artist Isaiah Zagar; himself concerned with urban recycling of materials for art.

Entirely self-taught in art, Max sites hobo culture as an influence. “Artists create their own environment, how they want to live, what kind of world they want to be in. And I was always kind of inspired by kind of hobo life, homeless people. People that kind of had it with the world. Had it with paying all this money to live in a box. And they could probably just go in a dumpster, find a cardboard box and make a fort out of that or something.”

He started making the wall sculptures and helmets just before COVID started. “I was like, what would you wear if you had to go into battle and scare your enemy? Part of this stuff is like an old truck that I found. I cut it in half. I opened up the doors for the eyelids. It’s made it a different truck parts. Tonka toy trucks. Parts of army helmets. A fan off a flywheel that went to some big truck. And I try to make it all functional so you can actually wear it. It’s a little uncomfortable because it’s a little rough on the inside. To join it all together I’ll use welding. Sometimes if it’s a soft metal, like galvanized, I’ll use a drill or rivets.”

And he’s extended that to his art process and gathering materials, “Doing construction, finding pieces of metal in buildings and taking them home, I know I could use this. A lot of times that stuff will just get thrown out. Someone will scrap it and you’ll never see it again. Being an artist, I am a bit of a hoarder. I like collecting things. I was thinking, how can I look at all the stuff that I collect? And make it like functional? So that you can maybe wear it or display in your house.”

With his DIY philosophy Max put on a one person, one night show at the old Key Bank building in downtown Albany this past October 6, but he was dissatisfied with the results. Could exhibitor and curator be the next “mediums” he works in? “What I would like to do is to make my backyard like the First Friday. And have everybody just come back here. Show my other artist friends. Have a barbecue.”

You can find Gregory Maxwell Dunn (Max Dunn) on Facebook.

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