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)