Watch as We Float: Will Maxen

Fridman Gallery is honored to announce Will Maxen’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Born in Waterbury, CT (1993) and based in Houston, TX, and Baton Rouge, LA, Maxen creates dreamlike, atmospheric paintings that explore belonging and movement in both literal and metaphorical spaces through the layering of thin oil and acrylic washes. 

Watch as We Float features a new series of 14 paintings examining ephemerality and durability of memory. Maxen draws from traditions of landscape painting and contemporary figuration to create abstract fields of rich color and translucent bodies, recontextualizing and renegotiating the relationship between figure and ground. 

Created in proximity to the Mississippi River, the paintings refrain a subtle motif of water as a metaphor for personal and historical vulnerability, human ego, and the complexities of selfhood. Water is simultaneously a carrier and a cleanser, a presence and a void, a conduit channeling the emotional weight of collective memory and a symbol of the inevitability of loss. The work asks what it means to endure through the currents of time and what an openness that defies established meanings might look like.

The tension between being and knowing remains a central question for Maxen, who has long been conversant with literary sources. Roland Barthes's reflections on neutrality, Lucille Clifton’s collection of poems How to Carry Water, and Tracy K Smith’s Wade in the Water echo throughout the paintings, which ultimately imagine what a transcendent state free from binary oppositions might require.

SUNJIR0 is a transdisciplinary artist and creative technologist who brings vital soul and aesthetic depth to the bleeding edge of technical arts. Their current practice makes use of live-coding environments to sculpt infinitely generating musical compositions within the realms of ambient, noise, and experimental electronic music.

blue is a generative composition in three movements, structured through code and voiced through experimental sound design. The piece navigates the watery threshold between life and death—the in-between space where spirits linger (bardo), where the trickster’s blues bends time (bayou), where swampy brooks babble with brackish emotions (bayuk), and where all of these elements converge at an ethereal crossroad.

Programmatically performed, blue ensures a unique listening experience with every iteration, yet remains encoded with a precise musical sensibility and soul. It builds upon SUNJIR0’s previous coded compositions, pushing further into the realms of sampling and temporal constraint and also using New Ear’s multi-channel sound system to create for their first time a truly three-dimensional soundscape. Balancing technical complexity with aesthetic beauty, the work exists at its own poetic crossroads.

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