PRIVATE VIEWING ROOM
STATEMENT
Many of America’s cultural “truths” have historically been, presently are, or will be revealed as mere stories; laundered into truth via imaginative use of science, media, and religion- for the purposes of hegemonic structures like the patriarchy, capitalism, and government. Think gender roles or paper currency. Even the United States of America is really just a set of ideas projected on a chunk of land and people.
I am trans (FtM), and as I transitioned I dropped through the trapdoor of one of these tales (dimorphic sex and gender), and the larger house of cards collapsed around me. It is tragic, though revelatory to see how differently the world treats you with a deepened voice and facial hair. I often now feel like I am embedded in a cult or maybe a tourist in Plato’s cave.
This work isn’t about being trans as much as it’s about being trapped in signification. In my case, I’m invisibly trans. I may look like an insurrectionist but I am a Queer Marxist feminist vegan transman; creating a complicated set of social projections for me to navigate if I am also to be authentic. I also now have a potentially soon to be illegal gender and body.
With apocalyptic humor and pathos, my work takes aim at stories of power relations, capitalism, identity, gender, and religion.
Motifs include the body as matter + language, The Grid, architectures of oppression, pattern, guts, chaos, mythologies, text, and sex jokes.
The Map and the Territory
This new series of objects feature collaged dioramas made from airbrushed paintings. The collages are recessed and enclosed; only visible via a silhouette incised through the front plane of a white box.
The architecture of the box both obstructs and reveals. The collaged world inhabits the shape of the cut silhouette and extends behind and beyond what we can see.
The silhouette becomes the positive visual figure via removal. The frame has invaded the geography of the artwork’s field of play, the face. Painting and frame have a dynamic of mutual codetermination. This work speaks to the existential contortions of living within the limits of signification.
2D / 3D / NO D
Forgoing the handmade mark, these surfaces are rendered with tools. I make painting tools derived from my drawings that act as screens or mediating filters for the airbrush. The airbrush mark takes on the characteristics and shape of these obstacles to the surface.
I think of this work as akin to photograms, but instead using light, I am using paint particles. Because the tools often have a thickness, it is possible to project the depth of their contours onto the surface by rotating my hand around them, leaving indexical physical traces of these 3d material objects on the surface.
I am thinking about something I might call “mirror spaces”. These are zones where we symbolically project ourselves, our power, and our ideas. Language is a mirror space. Religion, digital spaces, and the government for example, are all symbolic mirror spaces where the soul, the avatar, and the citizen operate as limited and imperfect approximations of us. I am concerned with the diminished resolution of this shift and the distortions that occur as our communication and social structure become increasingly mediated by technology and capital.
CV
Education
2012 University of Texas, MFA / Painting
2002 Kansas City Art Institute, BFA / Painting
Recent Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
2026 Upcoming Solo at High Noon Gallery , NY
2023 “Framer Container Explainer”, Solo, Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY
2022 “Finger Trap”, Solo, High Noon Gallery, NY, NY
“Mis-Shapes” , with Ad Minoliti and Madeline Jimenez-Santil, TSA Brooklyn, NY
2021 Spring/Break Art Fair | Here Say, Heresy , Solo, NY, NY
2020 Spring/Break Art Fair | In Excess, Solo, NY, NY
Plurals, A Compton Transgender District Project, with Joel Gregory, San Francisco
2019 Gender Facks / every body is a dummy, Solo, Vox Populi, Philadelphia
TransFigured Diction / a body puzzled, Solo, Haul, Brooklyn
2016 Post Human Animal Instinct, I wanna melt your gender hairs, Solo, Transform, Austin
2008 Kacy Maddux, Solo, Gescheidle Gallery, Chicago
2005 Pet Animal, Solo, Telephonebooth Gallery, Kansas City
Selected Group Exhibitions
2022 Not Me, Not That, Not Nothing Either, Leslie-Lohman GLBT Museum of Art, NY, NY
A.I.R. Currents/ Identity Politics, A.I.R. Gallery, NY, NY
Somebody Nobody Anybody , Marquee Projects , Bellport, NY
2021 Dog Park, Field Projects and Petty Cash Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Haunted Summer, Field Projects, NY, NY
Afterlight, Field Prorojects, NY, NY
2020 Stories , Haul Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Superimpose, Paradice Palase , Brooklyn , NY
2019 Routine Malfunction , 1969 Gallery, New York , NY
Queer as I, Here Art Center, New York, NY
New Flesh, The LIght Factory, Charlotte, NC
Twinkle, Barney Savage Gallery, New York, NY
Parade, Haul gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Body Language, Krasl Art Center , St. Joseph, MI
2018 This is Not Here, Re 21, Brooklyn, NY
Lady-Like, Border Patrol, Portland ME
2017 Tooth and Nail, Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn, NY
2016 To Be the Void, International Cultural Center of Poland, Krakow, Poland
Ligo Project, The art of Science, Brooklyn, NY
Gender UNbound, Austin, TX
2014 Soup Kitchen, Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2012 Home Grown, Brooklyn NY
Now Knowing, Cara and Cabezas Kansas City
2009 Happy Tree Friends, Urban Culture Project, Kansas City
2008 Slow cooked, Urban Culture/Okay Mountain exchange, Austin, TX
Group Exhibition, Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City
2006 Le papier (part) deux , Gescheidle, Chicago
2005 All the Pretty Corpses, The Renaissance Society, Chicago
Selected Artist Talks and Panels
Leslie-Lohman GLBT Museum, The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Yale, Kemper Museum of Art (Kansas City), Kansas City Jewish Museum, Transcender at Art During the Occupation Gallery (Brooklyn), Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn), Transform Gallery (Austin), Gescheidle (Chicago), Telephonebooth Gallery (Kansas City)
Museum Collection
Leslie Lohman GLBT Museum, NY, NY
Selected Awards and Residencies
2022 Lighthouse Works Residency
2019 Fire Island Residency (FIAR)
Yaddo Residency
2018 Wassaic Art Project Residency
Vermont Studio Center Residency
2017 Finalist for Cue Foundation Solo Exhibition Open Call
Finalist for New York Museum of Art and Design Studio Residency
2008 Three year merit based scholarship University of Texas
2005 One year studio residency ,Charlotte Street Foundation, KC MO
Selected Press and Publications
- DEAR DAVE Magazine, Issue 35, 9/01/2024
- New York Times, The Thrill of Unpredictability at Two Art Fairs, 3/5/2020
- Artforum, Critics Pick New York 5/8/19, Review of “Twinkle” at Barney Savage Gallery
- “KC Crow Maddux: Everybody is a Puzzled Dummy”, Filthy Dreams, 3/25/2019
- KC Crow Maddux, Maake Magazine, Issue 9
-British Journal of Photography Online , “What does Queerness Look like Beyond the Body”,
Marigold Warner, 11/14/19
-Original Plumbing, The Best of Ten Years of Trans Male Culture , Amos Mac , The Feminist Press
-“KC Crow Maddux: Everybody is a Puzzled Dummy”, Filthy Dreams, 3/25/2019
-Palimpsest, Yale Graduate Literary and Arts Magazine, Vol IX Trans
-Curator…l brings together 57 Artists… May 18, 2018 Forbes
-The Art Issue, Original Plumbing, Trans Male Quarterly
-Filthy Dreams, I feel a vague nausea, Emily Colucci