This article is part of Hyperallergic’s Pride Month series, featuring an interview with a different transgender or nonbinary emerging or mid-career artist every weekday throughout the month of June.
Brooklyn-based trans artist KC Crow Maddux looks at rectangular images as cropped. “Why is the rectangle a container?” he asks. “I just don’t get it.” And to his point, many artists operate within the predetermined parameters of four-cornered surfaces mounted at eye level on white walls before they even begin to create something. But for Maddux, these rectangular confines are akin to the gender binary, and he simply won’t be contained. The artist works in the realm of sculpture, though he describes his bisecting planar pieces as “frames” for his more intentionally cropped photographs. With an emphasis on the presence of the hand, Maddux’s frames come alive amidst their blurred translations from idealized concepts to real-world objects. In the interview below, the artist explains how he constructs real spaces through the intersection of anthropomorphized planes, bringing a voluminous dimensionality to otherwise flattened visual syntax.
Hyperallergic: What is the current focus of your artistic practice?
KC Crow Maddux: Right now, I’m interested in the (so often neglected) Z-axis of the picture plane. At around 19, through an actually quite painful process, I became completely disillusioned with illusionistic space and that investigation has been fueling my practice ever since.
I work with a flat, graphic, image-based visual language, but in sculptural time and form. For me, images are limited in their ability to substantively engage with embodiment. Images relate to reading and thinking, whereas objects correlate more directly to being. Oftentimes, an image exists in the bounds of a rectangle which places it in a different time and place from the viewer — like a window into the past. Sculpture lives in the present, contemporaneously with the viewer.
In my work, the physicality of the objects counters the cerebral vocabulary — relating squarely with my suspicion that thinking and being don’t often overlap each other neatly — especially when it comes to identity.
H: In what ways — if any — does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
KCM: My transition and break with the gender binary coincided with a much larger unraveling of my trust in cultural conventions, more broadly. Often, what’s normative isn’t actually buttressed with much beyond cultural and historical momentum. The familiar too often forecloses the possible. I think one of the reasons some people feel uncomfortable with transness is because it doesn’t simply add a third gender, it takes the binary and explodes it into multitudes.
The structure of my work originated from a list I developed of conventions I would not incorporate — work within the bounds of a rectangle or use photography as a window into another time and space, for example. “Trans” means across, between, or beyond. It’s a strategy to use against ideals, conventions, and habits; making new connections while always stretching just beyond our current reach.
For example, I consider almost all of my pieces to be framed photographs. Framing is contextualizing, and I personally don’t identify with a rectangular frame, so I build these sculptural frames to house the photos in. Because why not? Transness appears in my work in many forms, but primarily as a fierce aversion and discomfort toward default methods.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
KCM: Paul Thek’s Technological Reliquaries (1964–1967) drive me nuts. I’m on my third copy of Denis Hollier’s 1992 book Against Architecture — a must-read for anyone who is interested in Georges Bataille — I pick it up every year or so. David Altmejd’s room-size plexiglass sculptures and Ed Atkins’s uncanny videos are also great. Morgan Bassichis is fantastic. I’m also into Math Bass, Leigh Bowery, Rashid Johnson, Ever Baldwin, Natalie Ball, and Genesis Belanger.
A lot of my inspiration actually comes from ancient objects. Basically, anything carved in stone, especially text like Mayan hieroglyphics or Assyrian reliefs like the ones they have at the Brooklyn Museum. I like sculpted frames from the Byzantine era. Ancient Egyptian sculpture is probably my favorite.
They’re powerful visually, but these artifacts are also testaments to the brilliance and diversity of human voices across time and place. It’s very easy to get cynical and depressed about where we are today, but it’s difficult to lose hope when you look back and see everything humans have built and endured in the past. Everything will change, as it always has.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community at the current moment?
KCM: I really hope we can stick together. As we continue to expand the horizons of expression and put a finer and finer point to our identities, I hope we don’t forget how much we have in common. As certain groups within our umbrella find more acceptance, I hope they choose to leverage their status into action by supporting and uplifting the more marginalized.
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