I’m Here To Stop
Matthew Lawson Garrett
Installation view, Max Guy, I’m Here to Stop. Photos by Charles Benton, Courtesy of Laurel Gitlen
Arriving at Max Guy’s exhibition, I’m Here to Stop in Laurel Gitlen’s capacious living-room gallery exhibition, I’m greeted by Laurel herself, who leads me into a parquet-floored Bed-Stuy brownstone living-room with tall, twin windows, and lux furniture. Guy’s works are nestled throughout the rooms, unpretentiously arranged: on shelving units, above the couch, on the fireplace mantle among books, and around personal effects. In the entryway, the first work of Guy’s I see is a cluster of shoes placed strategically amongst the family’s, their toe-boxes fitted with small convex mirrors; I see my own reflection staring up at me. The artist’s statement for the show describes the shoes as “retired.” In the living room, more mirrors: polished steel spheres top the rims of empty wine bottles adorned with paper cutouts of cartoonishly proportioned silhouetted figures.
The central work of the exhibition, Invisible People (2026) is placed on a Dieter Rams designed Vitsœ 606 Universal Shelving System in the corner. It is a complex diorama of silhouettes cut from clear strips of mirrored paper and Dura-Lar film that dance theatrically beside art books. The exhibition material states they are characters from Japanese graphic novels (Ode to Kirihito and Dance of Death), bonsai trees (in the press release Gitlen notes: “tortured nature”), burial objects, shadow puppets by Hermann Rorschach, sculptures by Isamu Noguchi and Barbara Hepworth, figures from Hans Holbein paintings, and the silhouette of Guy himself—he notes that he is the only “real person” in the show.
As I’m guided through the exhibition by Gitlen, it is apparent that an upper-middle class family lives a comfortable life here. The exhibition haunts their living room with a cast of histrionic characters. Guy has described the challenge of making his work as to “harmoniously organize my collection and also to make things,” and a panoply of his collected silhouettes have gathered here like a theatre troop on tour. The form of the diorama has figured extensively in Guy’s past work—such as The Emerald City, the Big Head Scientist from 2022, in which a similarly complex layering of silhouetted figures cut from green acrylic formed a dioramic cityscape. Invisible People is a continued exploration of that form in soft material—several of the larger silhouettes droop provocatively, tracing elegant parabolas.
Invisible People, 2026, Laser cut Duralar, Strips: 9 × 24 × .005 inches, (23 × 61 × .012 cm)
Installation view, Max Guy, I’m Here to Stop. Photos by Charles Benton, Courtesy of Laurel Gitlen
Final Hill or Silent Fantasy, 2026. Collage on a wine bottle, steel bearing ball affixed by museum gel 13 ✕ 3 in., (33 ✕ 7.6 cm.)
The wine bottles are also small scenes, stretched around the bottles to resemble labels. Their title, Final Hill or Silent Fantasy (2026), plays on the exaggerated titling tropes of Japanese media, specifically referencing two video games, Final Fantasy and Silent Hill—the first, is known for featuring bands of ornately-dressed heroes trying to save the world; whereas the other is a deeply psychological horror that materializes psychological trauma into monsters. As the transposed title of these works, Final Hill or Silent Fantasy, imply, the artist’s methodology of collecting and arranging, along with further remixed referencing, coalesce into a system of signage. Their myriad of meanings is made in their comparison, opposition, and overlap. Looking at the bottles placed on the shelves below my line-of-site, the mirror balancing on their rims reflect a distorted image of myself, looking at the work, back at me.
The motif of reflection is echoed in the series of shoes with mirrors attached to their toeboxes. The series is titled Morpheus, with parenthesized additions. I chuckle at one work as I consider its title alongside my reflection: Morpheus #3 (Pervert Without Talent) (2024) is a pair of Vibram “Fivefinger” shoes designed to look like loafers, all black with white dip-dyed toes. As I bend down to get a closer look, there I am in the mirror, just above its articulated digits. They feel insidious in the domestic environment of Gitlen’s living room. The works play on the pop-culture trope of perverts placing mirrors on their shoes to look up women’s skirts. The title Morpheus brings to mind the dream-world of the game and gamer, and the fragile relationship between reality and the fictions maintained to scaffold that reality.
On the wall, several of Guy’s Leaf Negative (2016–ongoing) pieces are hung, and a binder on the shelf contains many more in plastic sheet protectors. In these collage works, the cut-out voids are the remaining fragments of press releases, art school assignments, exhibition checklists, and other archived ephemera that Guy has collected through the series’ ten year arc. The cut outs reveal layers of paper beneath them; silhouetted leaf-shaped stencils act as holes burrowing through the paper trail of Guy’s life. The leaves, as the original stencil source, are found objects—a further reinforcement of the artist’s practice that suggest a material disposition to collected ephemera.
Morpheus #4 (Mum), 2025. Juno shoes, 37 1/2, blind spot mirrors 4 x 10.5 ✕ 7 in., (10.16 ✕ 26.67 ✕ 17.78 cm.)
Leaf Negative #12, 2022–2026, Collage of inkjet prints, 8.5 ✕ 11 in., (21.5 ✕ 23 cm.)
Leaf Negative #13, 2025, Collage of toner print, artist’s frame, 15 ✕ 14 ✕ 3 in., (38 ✕ 35.5 ✕ 7.62 cm.)
Installation view, Max Guy, I’m Here to Stop. Photos by Charles Benton, Courtesy of Laurel Gitlen
I’m Here to Stop captures the libidinal nature of the fiction and images we consume in our homes, the overlapping courses of energy which combine and interfere to create the tensed meaning on which we stake our reality. The domestic space of the living room feels like the fitting environment for the haunting of Guy’s theatre troop of miniature ghosts, infiltrators with their perverted trick-shoes left at the door. The artist’s subjectivity appears only as the collector of these characters. They take on a life of their own in Gitlen’s living room, embedding themselves in the dream and psyche of their primary voyeurs: Gitlen, her family, and the heightened aesthetics in which they surround themselves with. The exhibition reveals the Other in our own homes that we must work to oppress, the Other that materializes in sublimated form as a marching cavalry drawn from the images we consume and compress into CDs and comic books.
In his artist statement for the show, Guy writes that the title is taken from “a terrifying fake Kafka story, which no one had written” and refers to the artist's apprehensive fear of the impending closure of deadlines—what he calls “A totality beyond my control.” What frightens Guy about this closure, he continues, is that “I don’t know enough, that I haven’t gathered enough yet.” I’m Here to Stop works precisely because of this obsessive fear, the anxiety that drives his collecting of images and objects. In Gitlen’s living room, Guy’s knowledge and the things he has gathered are transmuted into domestic ghosts. The layering of their fictions and ephemera stains the objects throughout with the fact that we are also endlessly collecting objects and knowledge to no end. While exhibitions staged within domestic environments tend to lean toward staining art with its commercial future as commodity, I’m Here to Stop speculates on the idea that art is also fiction, and as fiction, it might escape its fate of becoming commodity—even when if it eventually ends up as an object of speculation, delicately placed above the couch.
Installation view, Max Guy, I’m Here to Stop. Photos by Charles Benton, Courtesy of Laurel Gitlen
Matthew Lawson Garrett is a writer, curator, and researcher based in New York. His work explores the relationship between infrastructure and affect. His recent projects include SERVICE INTERRUPTION (2024) at Space N.N., Munich, The Appearance of Distance (2025) at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York, and Vanishing Meter at Petrine, Dusseldorf. He holds an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, Flash-Art, Impulse, and more.