Oslo sardine bar. Another roadside attraction is coming to old highway 80 in the town of jacumba hot springs Help us build out our new space for the next sardine bar installation with a theater, full service tin bar, Sea monkey

circus, and more Fully interactive. Automated and delicious All are welcome as always. We love you fish heads

about the artist …

Notes by Jill Dawsey, PhD, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego for Max Robert Daily

At a gallery exhibition in 2015, I unexpectedly found myself wearing a paper hat and eating

sardines. On the walls hung Max Daily’s drawings of Saint Nichols of Oslo, a character who wore a quilt that

contained an entire ocean and sent paper ships to rescue drowning sailors. In the center of the room,

a patchwork quilt made of maps resembled an island surrounded by the sea, while outside on the sidewalk, Daily served up canned fish and crackers. I have admired his distinctive artistic sensibility ever since.

Like many contemporary artists, Daily works across mediums—fzrom drawing to sculpture to performance--but his background is unconventional. His training included puppetry, animation, clowning, improv comedy, and even an apprenticeship as

a butcher, and he retains elements of all these disciplines in his current practice. Like the work of his artistic hero

Buster Keaton, Daily’s art involves clowning, ingenious storytelling, and a certain stoic bravery. His performances and paintings conjure a range of offbeat adventures: shipwrecks, bullfights, toboggan rides, and abalone diving, to name a few. Daily often performs as one of his alter egos—Marcel Zooey or Maxfield Rubbish—and plays multiple roles in a single staging, as when he performs a bullfight and plays both the bullfighter and the bull. In his experimental puppet theater productions, Daily employs inventive costumes and props made of found objects and materials: the economical combination of a feather duster and roller skate, for example, forms a convincing duck in his staging of Peter and the Wolf. In a gallery context, this theatrical prop serves as a compelling stand-alone sculpture. Even as Daily’s work has become more firmly rooted in his studio art practice, his works suggest performative possibilities. For instance, he creates plaster sculptures that he terms “action potentials,” an acknowledgment of the potential for the fragile objects to be smashed—by the artist or a buyer of his work. Perhaps my favorite artwork by Daily is a poetic sculptural installation in which a fan gently blows a mound of sand across the floor. That work is also a subtle piece of theater.

In 2016, Daily opened Oslo, a sardine bar and installation artwork originally sited at Bread & Salt in Barrio Logan. As the proprietor of Oslo, Daily offers an extensive menu of canned fish along with his whimsical storytelling. Oslo is a “social sculp- ture” in the tradition of Bay Area conceptual artist Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970), an art event that revolved around the ordinary ritual of beer consumption. Oslo offers a similar participatory art experience, yet Daily’s narratives pull us out of our predictable and comfortable routines. Is Oslo named for the artist’s great uncle Oslo, who worked in a bread factory and ate a daily lunch of fish canned by Daily’s grandmother? Did Oslo first begin in the supply closet of a stranded freighter ship, with Daily serving sardines and Czech rum to his fellow merchant marines? Does it all lead back to Saint Nichols of Oslo, who rescued drowning sailors? Daily’s work prompts us to entertain all of these possi- bilities, and to imagine other narraves of our own.