This exhibition marks the artist’s first return to Chicago in nearly twenty years: first exhibiting at the Renaissance Society as part of All the Pretty Corpses (2006), Maddux went on to present his inaugural solo exhibition at gescheidle (2007). 

Curated once again by Susan Gescheidle, KC Maddux’s newest series of dioramic paintings commemorates his decades-long conceptualization of symbolisms and visual architectures that inhabit the spaces where binary language fails, and then dissolves.

In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell cites political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, writing, “legibility [becomes] a condition of manipulation” (10), calling attention to the comprehensibility of gender as a hegemonic construction subject to, and shaped by, the control of state power. She postulates the glitch as its antithesis: “thus, the glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest. This failure to function within the confines of a society that fails us is a pointed and necessary refusal” (11). The glitch is then a literal gouging into the framework surrounding the normative, binary body - the creation of a rupture, a passageway, out of a confined state of legibility and into a liberated, paradoxical in-between.
 
If Russel demands a hole that must be torn, then Maddux imagines what lies within its fissure. His works employ a mechanism of “openings” that build a lexicon of voids, frames, and shadows. First constructing frames around recessed, airbrush-painted collages, Maddux uses cutout silhouettes of melding, protean human forms as the apertures through which the inner paintings are seen. His collages are built by layering airbrushed images of architectural and bodily glyphs on paper at varying depths until they flow into each other with a somatic, visceral disintegration. Visually, these “openings” reference a bodily orifice; conceptually, the “opening” suggests the body's porous osmosis, eroding the historically limited nomenclature of identity towards a more alchemical understanding of the physical and social form. 

As a trans artist, Maddux unfolds his contentions with gender through this process of visual deconstruction and reconstruction. By operating within a “trans format,” he refuses to occupy one, definable medium and instead flutters freely between sculpture, photography, and painting. His work is in part a critique of traditional compositional structures as a parallel to the normative social constructs of architecture, language, gender and power, i.e, the rectilinear cropped image and the two dimensional plane representing a restrictive field of representation. It is equally the appropriation of these visual structures in crafting a more opaque language, offering new multitude and depth to an otherwise deficient system of semantics. Quietly contemplative in nature, Maddux’s works create a place where collapse is an ultimately generative process. Here, the orifice is the beginning of semiotic production - an open maw where the internal, digestive process of language-making can be perceived, and new meaning can emerge. 

Photo by Bob. (Robert Heishman)

Tala is excited to host 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘎𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳, a book launch and exhibition by Steven Piper opening on Friday November 14, 6-9PM

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘎𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 is an ongoing, evolving photographic series featuring a selection of images from a larger body of more than 2,000 photographs taken by Piper between 2018 and 2024 across Paris, Étretat, Bordeaux, Arcachon, and Biarritz. For this iteration, 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘎𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 will manifest as an exhibition of Piper’s most recent pallatinum palladium prints alongside taking publication form for the first time. Printed by Nocault, a limited edition photography book of 500 will accompany the show. Available for purchase opening night.

𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘎𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 is an continuous exploration of Piper’s recurring subject of choice - the stranger. To him, this proximity to the subject is an extension of his fascination with scales of intimacy. Arranged along a progressing gradient of proximity, far away landscapes sequentially become detailed portraits. Piper invites the viewer to perceive themselves through the eyes of a stranger, as if meeting for the first time - suspending the moment of first recognition as a practice of releasing judgements and an affirmation of an eternal gaze.

“𝘛𝘰 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘢 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦, 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘴𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺”

The classical pianist Glenn Gould once claimed that live performance was a lie: that the myth of a singular climax or resolution betrayed music’s real potential to exist in fragments, repetitions, and variations without end. In 1962, before a Carnegie Hall audience, conductor Leonard Bernstein famously disavowed Gould’s interpretation of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, announcing his disagreement even as he went on to conduct it with Gould at the keys. Soon after, Gould abandoned live performance for the recording studio, refusing the teleological “end” of performance-as-event in favor of endless rehearsal, revision, and loop. He displaced resolution, shifting it from the arc of live performance into the artificial layering of fragments.

This refusal resonates beyond music. In modernist aesthetics, teleology structured assumptions of progress: that art evolved linearly from realism to abstraction, or from medium specificity to dematerialization. Postmodern and contemporary theory have since revealed these trajectories as constructed, ideological, and often Eurocentric. What remains instead are practices that stall, divert, or parody resolution. Structures falter at their intended ends, fragments substitute or defer, and objects linger as residues of teleological promise undone.

The works of Laila Majid, Joseph J. Greer, and Anastasia Sif Karkazis each stage this condition differently. Majid’s Chasers, suspended on delicately pliant piano wire, carry an embodied nervousness, their vibrating forms oscillating between lure and refusal. They evoke touch yet withhold it, marking thresholds where presence flickers and slips away. Greer’s sculptures pursue a mode of disassemblage and reconstitution of mechanical purpose, where use gives way to misalignment and recognition gives way to semblance. His appropriated vehicle parts double as lures, fragments that parody design memory, staging frustrated encounters with function. Karkazis composes soundscapes where the familiar becomes estranged: a film score warped with field recordings, insect rhythms made uncanny, personal notes spoken by her digitally decomposing vocal, voice clones caught between presence and absence. Confessions emerge from indiscernible speakers only to dissolve before they can be verified. Her loops fold intimacy into distance, refracting recognition into misrecognition and making listening itself a suspended act, where meaning hovers without resolution.

Together, these works do not offer resolution but orbit one another in suspension. Desire flickers into refusal, utility into parody, intimacy into absence. What results is not dysfunction alone but a melancholic satire of systems undone, where meaning remains speculative, fragmentary, and everything strains toward relation.

Exhibition text written by Misael José Oquendo, writer and visual artist.

Photo by Bob. (Robert Heishman)

‘If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.’

Toni Morrison, Beloved 
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 6