Max Colby (b. 1990, American) examines popular cultural codes and symbols embedded in mundane materials. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and collage. Her work explores transfiguration and tensions between love and death; celebration and mourning; materiality and abstraction.
Colby’s sculptural work bears initial reference to ceremonial assembly, funereal objects, and altars. In material, she parodies colonial and imperial American aesthetics, a framework she subverts through humor and assemblages of excess. What culminates are transfigurations of symbols towards abstract portals, gateways, and unknown objects, allowing for expansive possibilities past known categorical approaches to the body and a desire for rites to solidify them.
The artist questions categorical fixity, seeking breaks beyond normative structures making work which instills a sense of non-place, non-home, and expansive potentiality. Colby’s work challenges these broad desires from a trans subjectivity. In a predominantly abundant application, she inserts evidence of life, calls for celebration, commemoration, in the face of antagonistic consumptions and expulsions of [trans] bodies.
Colby lives and works in New York City. In 2012, she received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Wassaic Project, MASS MoCA and a Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship. In support of her installations and sculptural work, Colby has received numerous research and project grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and YoungArts, among others. Colby has exhibited at institutions including Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Wave Hill, and Museum Rijswijk. In 2022 Colby exhibited a campus-wide public commission at Rockefeller Center presented by Art Production Fund. She has since presented solo exhibitions at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and Aicon Gallery in New York, NY.
Shroud #6 (study) [detail], 2022, Found ‘Crazy’ quilt ca. 1900, trim, fabric flowers, garland, dolls, costume jewelry, buttons, plastic flowers and fauna, beads, sequins, thread, fabric, pine, 27 x 28 x 5”.