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Max Colby - Artists - Aicon Art 2024

MAX COLBY

Born 1990.

Lives and works in New York City.

Max Colby’s work is at once a site for joy and reprieve, highlighted by lush detail and extravagant color while in the same moment, a somber viewing act. Embellished with beads, sequins, and other adornments, she rigorously explores identity through material histories. Her work highlights precarity and vulnerability through a consistent investigation of ritual objects, most often, funereal. Touching on such ceremonial iconography, the artist constructs objects which subvert the aesthetics of patriarchal systems. Colby’s activation of material is unabashedly camp, providing a space to reimagine our relationship to gender, class, and the mundane. Expansive in practice, Colby’s work encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, collage, and embroidery.

In her practice, the obsessive process of creating objects with campy, audacious, yet poignant presence is a moment for dissecting deeply embedded cultural conditions of normative gender, class, and power. For Colby, this process and the resulting work allows for revival, embrace, and opulence in the face of a cultural narrative posing death as a singular path. Temporality becomes her main investigation. Through regeneration and subversion, Colby investigates paths toward abundance.