Maxile Martel
Year: 2019
Location: Boileryard
Montreal’s Maxille Martel (a.k.a., “Mono Sourcil”) made the long trek down to Charlotte to bring her quirky, comic-inspired characters to the exterior of the Ford Factory. When channeled through each of the artists in the line-up, the weekend’s themes of technology and innovation saw vastly different interpretations. “I took that theme of ‘technology’ and went in the direction of robots, aliens, and monsters,” Martel said, as she painted a collection of bizarre figures on her door. She also implemented technology in more literal sense: Using projection technology, she animated the characters, moving them and altering their hues. It’s not an ongoing aspect of her “14 Doors” mural, but if you attended the evening festivities of END-to-END, you may have been lucky enough to catch the one-off showcase of how Martel can bring her characters to life.
It was a rare activation for her mural practice, one she had only previously done in her native Canada. (Her varied practice takes many forms: murals, sculpture, performance art, apparel design, and anything other surface that will host her creatures.) Yet, for an event with the subtitle “A Confluence of Innovation,” she was willing to experiment, and nighttime passers-by benefited from it.