Maxwell Lukas Mijnlieff Gay

My practice is focused on unpacking personal identity and experience as it relates to the shared realities of my community. I primarily work in photography and lens based media, but my practice also includes printmaking, appropriated imagery, creative coding and new media works, sculpture and installation. I believe artists are granted social permissions to transgress linear modes of thinking and thereby have the opportunity to make deep social change. My impetus to make artwork largely comes from this belief, and my practice rests on art as a tool for making meaning and actualizing imaginations of a world worth living in. My work addresses crime, surveillance, addiction, gentrification, and the detritus of consumerism. I am interested in the reevaluation and deconstruction of oppressive systems, displacement, violence, and injustice. I frequently use photography as a medium because of its history which strives to reclaim representation and disrupt popular narratives, but because of my interest in narrative and meaning, my work often is seemingly disparate in form; the medium I work in on a given project is dictated by its conceptual backing and my deduction of what best serves that.