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)

Taking publication form for the first time, How Close Can You Get to a Stranger by Steven Piper is an iterative extension of an ongoing photographic series presenting a selection of images from a total body of work comprising of over 2,000 images captured between 2018 and 2024 from Paris, Étretat, Bordeaux, Arcachon, and Biarritz. The series,
both deeply personal and astutely observational, represents an insight into Piper’s dedicated and sincere approach to photography. With the same tender observation of noticing a flower bud in spring, Piper’s impetus to capture an image is first inspired by an intuition of intimacy - struck by that which is true, timeless, and fleeting.

To him, proximity to the subject is an extension of this fascination with scales of intimacy; Piper oscillates between images that move directly into the subjects personal space (reminiscent of Gary Winogrand’s famously intrusive and imperfect street portraits) and those that capture chance moments from afar, revealing the relationship between subjects and their environment or each other (echoing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pursuit of a “decisive moment,” where all elements in a scene align in fleeting harmony). In all of these snapshots, Piper foregrounds humor and romance, approaching the camera as a place where wonder acts not only as a driving force but also as a recurring theme within
his work. Approaching his practice with the same evocative attention to a moment’s essence, Piper memorializes chance imperfections (an errant hair, a mistaken flash, or a blur of light) as tributes to a uniting human experience, elevating them from a realm of mundanity to magic.

How Close Can You Get to a Stranger is arranged along this gradient of proximity, bringing the viewer progressively closer to Piper’s recurring subject of choice - the stranger. Far-away landscapes sequentially become intimate portraits: each page taking one, metaphorical step, closer. Piper desires to extend the first encounter with a passerby - to
him, a serendipitous meeting is both an opportunity for sonder and the potential to present oneself authentically, free of preconceived notions. In a contemplative twist of perspectives, 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, before assumptions take hold. Each image becomes an invitation to enter
this instance: a practice of releasing judgements meant to be carried away, even after stepping beyond the frame.

As a self taught commercial and street photographer, Piper has forged his own path with the goal of uplifting other emerging artists as much as creating a timeless image. Underpinning his visual practice is an inherent sense of gentle generosity that runs through his frames like a guiding current, reflected in the emotions of the moments he chooses to capture. Piper’s subjects recline in leisure, grin without abandon, or fall into each other’s arms in embrace. In deciding to preserve them, he affirms his conviction to an eternal gaze, transforming a split second into an ever-folding encounter. In this way, How Close Can You Get to a Stranger is a love letter, a time capsule, and an offering to the viewer - an insistence that the act of looking is akin to a promise that here, in the
same way a passing moment can become an eternity, we might not be strangers after all.

“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