April 2025 AIR: Max Guy
“I have many questions about the world”
Max, we’re so excited to have you as part of the 2025 AIR cohort! To kick things off, in your artist statement, you mention your desire to “make poetry of the world.” Can you share what this concept means to you and how it shapes your practice?
I take literature as the foundation for much of my art, whether stories, plays, or poems. But we should also remember that poetry comes from the Greek word “poein,” which means to make. So, I’m interested in worldmaking and externalizing my perception of the world around me, but I’m also interested in the redundancy of it all.
As someone who works across a variety of mediums, how do you decide which one to use for each project? How do you think the choice of medium influences the way your ideas are communicated to your audience?
Any time I’ve said, “I want to make a video,” it hasn’t worked out, and if I buy specific tools, it could take me forever to use them. I face many mental obstacles to accomplishing pretty much anything. I find it more helpful to think about practices or disciplines. So, I always try to keep my work concise and easy to assemble or transmit. As a sculptor, I’m interested in instigating a material truth and allowing that truth to persist in my absence. As a printer, I think about ergonomics. I have many questions about the world and things to see and express that no one medium sufficiently resolves.
Accessibility plays a role in some of your work. Can you talk about what you hope a viewer gets out of works that have these themes?
I’m more concerned with externalizing my subject position in hopes that people relate than what someone gets out of work. An audience can be gratified when they arrive at their conclusions. If accessibility plays a role in my work it’s because I’m curious about what it means to be a product of one’s environment.
How does the presence of existing objects and created drawings, images, installations relate to one another within your pieces? Do they speak to each other in a specific way or create new meanings when combined?
Modifying and composing readymade materials is fun! The things I assemble mostly speak to my desires and intuitions. My collaged materials are usually pretty pointed, so any new meanings I create are like combining letters into a word, stringing words together in a sentence, or combining musical notes into chords. Or like letters on a Scrabble board. When I was younger, I was attracted to artists whose breadth of work was diverse to the point of being unwieldy. There is something unique to assembling enough things that they become as inexplicable as the world itself.
Time and space are often central to your practice. How do these concepts manifest in your creative process, and how do they shape the way you present your work in physical or conceptual space?
Thinking about how to orchestrate different representations of spacetime is sort of like medium-specificity, isn’t it? Most things we know are composed in and of time and space, taking on many forms. A scanner composites multiple moments into a single image; a clock points to one minute, second, or hour at a time. Sculptures react to temperamental environments and temporalities, thus creating monuments. Performances last particular durations, but the moment's intensity is a mutual consensus between the performer and the audience. Generally, I prioritize the quality of time over chronology.
Max Guy
Max Guy (b. 1989 McAllen, Texas) lives in Chicago, Illinois. Guy works with paper, video, performance, assemblage, and installation and uses fast, ergonomic ways to make poetry of the world, filtering it through personal effects. He received a BFA in 2011 from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in 2016 from Northwestern University. Guy has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Drawing Room at The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery 400, Good Weather, Prairie, Apparatus Projects, Produce Model, and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; AND NOW (Dallas); Jack Shainman, Nicola Vassell, Laurel Gitlen, Kai Matsumiya (New York); Romance (Pittsburgh); Each Modern (Taipei), Good Weather (Chicago), Gallery 400 (Chicago), Krannert Museum of Art (Urbana-Champaign); Malmö Museum of Art (Malmö, Sweden); What Pipeline (Detroit); and Galeria Federico Vavassori (Milan). Max is a 2024 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee in New Art Forms.