It’s been a long time since a piece of art made us choke. But there we were, mouth full of water, and – boom! Out comes the wet stuff, dousing us and our computer. We howled, then toweled off.
The art in question was a merry, glazed-ceramic piece titled The Blue Bunny from the “Max Lehman: Products of a Disordered Mind” exhibit. The ASU grad’s frumpled brain was the product of immersion in downtown’s pre-First Fridays art scene of the 1980s/’90s, which was centered on talent incubators such as CRASHarts, MARS Artspace, and the Icehouse.
Lehman now lives near Santa Fe with five dogs and a warren of pop-culture bunnies. “Part of being a pop artist is to go with the flow,” Lehman tells New Times. “My imagery is quite a mishmash of several ideas. I am heavily influenced these days by the fine-art toy movement, or ‘kaiju for adults,’ as it’s known in Japan.”
Lehman started whipping up siwwy wabbits four years ago, and now, like the fast-reproducing family Leporidae, he can’t stop. His quirky creations reference everything from Golden Age Hollywood to TV Nation (“Some day I should do a couch-potato bunny”) to mainstream advertising. “I love the characterization of food or the use of animal cartoons in advertising,” he says. “Has anyone else ever found it creepy to see a pig selling sausages?”
Tuesdays-Sundays; Thu., Feb. 21, 7-9 p.m. Starts: Feb. 7. Continues through Feb. 24, 2008
