New York
Covered windows and black-painted walls created a dramatic, theatrical setting for Max Hooper Schneider’s recent exhibition “Scavenger.” Elaborate sculptural assemblages and densely packed vitrines, dioramas, and constructed environments made from a wide range of materials—including biological organisms, thrift store and craft shop supplies, lamps and LED lights, crystals, stuffed animals, toys, trash, discarded objects, and even teeth—defied simple description and containment.
At the entrance, two works installed in a large pond/moat introduced Hooper Schneider’s over-the-top, accumulative process and aesthetic drawn from popular culture, science fiction, and grunge. Honey I Shrunk the Kids (The Fountain) (2025), a large Oreo cookie covered with clumps of living and plastic plants, cast-off jewelry, rocks, and a working fountain, could be mistaken for a movie prop or amusement park attraction. Nearby, Estuary Holobiont (2021) rose like a volcano in a low-budget film, its mound of marine plants, algae, and estuarine detritus topped by a spiny, metallic, spider-like form. Comical and captivating, this staged primordial ecosystem combined spectacle with the mundane to immerse viewers in an eccentric, luridly threatening, ever-changing post-apocalyptic world.
A group of sculptures displayed on pedestals, collectively titled Dendrite Bonsai (2024), joined the Japanese art of growing and shaping miniature trees with decorative still-life and floral display. Each piece was fabricated from organic materials like horseshoe crabs, fruit (including avocados and plums), cacti, and coral, manipulated into elaborate compositions, and then copper electroplated. The intricate, even elegant, arrangements, with their faux-metallic patina, give way to imaginative grotesques, monstrous creatures, and odd, biomorphic forms that both attract and repel. Fusing nature and artifice while highlighting metamorphosis, conversion, and collaborative practice, these sculptures recall Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic hybrid figures and exploration of alchemy and science, philosophy and religious belief.
These works, along with the vitrines, dioramas, and constructions scattered throughout the exhibition, all performed as “trans-habitats”—a term that Hooper Schneider uses to describe his aggregated, kinesthetic configurations that interact with the viewer and surrounding space. Eliminating boundaries between the organic and inorganic, human and non-human, and accenting process and materials, each work encouraged exploration of the symbiotic relationship between creative process and the cycle of evolution, entropy, and re-creation.
Hooper Schneider’s experiential habitats were perhaps best visualized in his custom acrylic vitrines filled with fossils, gemstones, crystals, various metallic compounds, and hand-blown glass mushrooms. Riffing on curio cabinets and natural history displays and the alchemical transmutation of base materials and everyday things, these pieces simulate morphogenic modulation. Given poetic titles such as Frozen Tears of the Ammonite Rain Upon the Impure and Shrine To Naught and referencing imagined worlds as in Jasper Archipelago Pleroma, they invite intimate consideration of strange new realms of scientific experimentation and surreal invention.
Rather than containment, Hooper Schneider’s work seems to focus on expansion and the embrace of new meanings and worlds, unfurling like the strands of a conspiracy theory. Nightmare Machine (2025), a large tabletop diorama, for instance, serves up a complex apocalyptic vision. Above and within a model of a mountain grotto made from crystals and fake rocks and illuminated by colorful LED lights, a swarming horde of toy ghouls, miniature human figures, and cars enact video game scenarios as LCD screens project films and a line of raccoon, deer, cat, shark, and human teeth attached to a bicycle chain parades along the perimeter.
Whether viewed as the work of a tinkering inventor/scientist or an obsessive hoarder immersed in the expressive potential of a scavenger economy, Hooper Schneider’s invented ecosystems offered a startling phantasmagoric paradigm of modern experience as well as an apparition of a post-human future.
