Turley Gallery presents Framer Container Explainer, a solo exhibition from KC Crow Maddux.

My body contains layers of depiction and function. It is both a signal and a complex of organs. For better or worse, my exterior appearance lays my track in the social matrix. My guts have no gender. 

I wear my non-binary, trans body while I am equivalent to it. It is a speech act, an armature, and the entirety of me. Similarly, language is the house my thoughts live in. My thoughts are facilitated and often equivalent to language while also existing outside it. I am a cell of the social body; culturally constructed and inextricable from the soup I swim in. But there is also an excess of me, that bubbles over and drips out of the container, the name, and the apparatus.

Identity is a mess; tangled in the gaps and relationships between depiction, description, naming, and embodiment. My work teases at this knot: code switching at axis and tangents that bisect regions of contested terrain. How is meaning mapped onto being? Sometimes what you say is eclipsed by how you say it.

In this body of work, transparent documents of my trans body in various positions—“photos”—are housed in handmade, anthropomorphic, sculptural “frames”. The frames provide the context, cropping, and support for the photos. These frames exceed the conventional rectangular picture format—they are of the excess, untethered and critical of the rectilinear tradition. Vessels give their fluid contents shape. The rectangle is a problem for me, not a solution. 

These sculptures are rendered through modulating layers of flatness. Each of these modes has unique spatial dynamics. The transparent photographs create a sense of deep space projecting from a flat 2D print, relief creates shallower space, and painting shallower still. Each mode speaks differently; through discrete methods of depicting information i.e diagram, document, symbol, and written language. They talk against each other. They seem to cohere but do not synthesize.

These objects are glyphs with organs, embodied drawings, and architectural utterances; unstable pictographs that complicate the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

—KC Crow Maddux