Educational toys and play structures have a significant role in our understanding of the innatimate world. Children are inurred to the laws of physics through play, or more specifically, through a series of simulated encounters with world geometry facilitated by play objects. Some lessons concern our physical well being—  I am lucky to have been on a playground when I learned what height is unsafe to fall from — but others are more cerebral. How else would we know that a square peg does not fit in a round hole without the Melissa and Doug Shape Sorting Cube™? We have all had to negotiate the difference between where our minds can go and what our bodies are capable of, and understanding one’s own imitations is a serious obstacle on the path to maturity, but it is one that is often overcome with these implements in hand.

Hertz’s sculptures abstract the formal language of the play structure and instructive toy. His work is thouroughly enmeshed in our memories of play, and although no more functional than any other art object, the abstract geometric forms universally share a visceral and intimate familiarity. The Puzzle Drawings are amalgams of irregular polygons deliniated by bright, primary colors. Plywood pegs protrude from the piece’s otherwise flat surface like an activity panel on a climbable play structure. Hertz’s free standing sculptures are a maze of interlocking plywood beams that beg to be grasped and navigated, but equally deviate in scale and stylistically from the functional architecture of the play structure.

Better Structures is an uncanny valley of playground and homeroom standards. The work is almost something we remember, a jungle gym or a shape sorting cube, but the forms change just before they grow too familiar. They infer towards a novel experience of the world without recreating childhood innocence, instead displacing the objects that populate our memories with new forms. They are abstractions of play, invigorated by the lingering mystery of our first encounters with unfamiliar geometries; when our bodies were curious and wholly unaquainted with the physical world and its limitations. 

Max Hertz was born in 1996 in Los Angeles, California. He attended Rhode Island School of Design in Providnce, graduating with a BFA in 2019. Hertz has previously shown with WNDW, Craig Krull and SPY Projects. He currently lives and works in LA.