Daily Inspiration: Meet Max Mather

Today we’d like to introduce you to Max Mather.

Hi Max, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My life and career changed dramatically when I began pursuing a Master in Fine Arts from The University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices (EDP) program in 2021. EDP emphasizes the ethical boundaries of creating art with contemporary digital tools. This program introduced me to software and techniques that allowed me to develop my unique artistic practice.

In 2022 I was accepted to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Creators Cohort – a summer-long fellowship experience designed for artists at the beginning of their careers. Through connections in the Creator’s Cohort, I received my first paid design jobs, and was awarded with funding that supported the first years of my career.

The greatest highlights of my professional career are a product of my relationship with Denver Digerati. In 2022 Denver Digerati featured an interactive coding piece I made in a group exhibition at the CU Denver Experience Gallery. Since then they have been gracious enough to provide me with incredible opportunities to grow and showcase my art. I received a residency at Denver Digerati’s studio in early 2023. They also curated three of my animations to be included in the Denver Art Museum’s “Untitled” Series. Meow Wolf Convergence Station curated an animation I created to be screened for a 6-month run in their movie theatre at the recommendation of the Denver Digerati team.

I am currently working on a series of animations and sculptures that will be included in a solo exhibition next year at Deep Space Drive-In Gallery. The exhibition will feature digital animations, sculptures produced with 3D printing and laser cutting, and projection mapping on these sculptures with real-time visuals that respond to the movement of visitors in the space. This is my second time working with Deep Space Drive-In; they were kind enough to host an audio/visual performance event created by my friend/collaborator Austin Slominski and myself in 2023. I’m very grateful that the Deep Space Drive-In team has offered to host my debut solo exhibition in their gallery next year.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
One of the biggest struggles of being an artist is having to balance multiple responsibilities at once. There’s so many different demands involved in pursuing a career in the arts, from growing your network, informing people about your work, finding opportunities, showing up for your community, making the actual art. Dividing my time across these various areas has been challenging, and there are times that finding a balance is difficult.

I’ve also faced personal struggles with my relationship to my work. There is a cost/benefit analysis to making deeply personal art. It’s a very vulnerable process, that – at its worst – feels like reading a page out of someone’s diary, and – at best – can be an affirming, relatable, or illuminating experience. Working on this body of work for my upcoming solo exhibition has allowed me to find confidence in the ideas behind my work. It’s a different body of work than I would have been drawn to make in the past, and it’s embedded with more meaning because of the of events, sensations, and emotions I’ve exposed myself to.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My practice is a reflection of my experiences as a trans man creating art during a political era that is increasingly hostile towards the existence of trans people. Through animations, digitally fabricated sculptures, and interactive projection mapping installations, my art considers trans identity through lenses of spirituality, intimacy, and surveillance. The signature characteristic of my work are organic, abstract human bodies, produced by 3D scanning my body and abstracting these scans in software through a unique sequence of physics simulators.

I was introduced to 3D scanning at a workshop I attended my second year in grad school; this sparked my interest in 3D scanning as a digital medium. I began to explore with the low-fidelity scanning tools offered by iPhones, eventually developing a 3D portrait portfolio my body in various poses. The scans are imperfect – embedded with emergent artifacts; reflecting how queer bodies are read imperfectly and incompletely by digital and political systems.

Rather than avoiding these artifacts I developed an editing process to emphasize them. I use physics simulators within a 3D editing software to pinch and squeeze the bodies, resulting in forms unrecognizable from the original scans. This process parallels experiences of making oneself legible as a gender queer person in a binary-gendered world.

I develop animations around these characters, placing them in digital environments and simulations. My first animation – “ENMESHED” – has screened at the Sie Film Center, The Denver Art Museum, and was featured in the Night Lights Denver series. In 2022, I released “GEMINI” – a short film produced entirely with digital animations featuring my characters. “GEMINI” has been screened at the Sie Film Center, The Denver Art Museum, and the Meow Wolf Convergence Station movie theatre.

In 2023, I began to explore 3D printing as a medium of expression for my characters. “STATIONS OF THE X” – a sculpture series I created – was featured in the University of Denver’s Community Commons Gallery. Last year I led a workshop on my 3D scanning and editing process at a Music and Arts Festival in Longmont, CO. As workshop attendants were taken through the steps of the scanning and editing process they were asked to consider how they could integrate this technology with mindfulness practices to increase self-regulation. Participants received a 3D print of their edited scan at the end of the weekend, as a token to remember the experience. This has been much of my draw to sculpture as a medium – it physically tokenizes a process that otherwise exists only on a screen.

The reflexive process of my work – beginning with my body in the physical world, scanning and editing my body to produce an impossible digital version of it, then using technology to bring the digital body back into the physical world – is deeply connected to my identity as a trans artist. My experience with my own body is full of impermanence and impossibility, and the characters within my work speak to this tension.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck has played a role in the timing of my life and career. Coming across opportunities and people at specific moments opened doors for me that would not have been opened otherwise. Applying to my graduate program during COVID allowed me to transition my career during a time when many people were taking pause and reconsidering their path – so I felt like I had a lot of permission from people within my life to take that step. The fellowship I received with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver was a huge stroke of luck – if I’d been one year older I wouldn’t have qualified for the inaugural edition program. There have been many opportunities that I have a hunch I received because I was in the right place at the right time – running into someone in passing and getting an email from them the next week asking to curate my work.

However, I feel that attributing my career to luck minimizes the many intentional choices I had to make to be offered these opportunities. Most opportunities feel like they’re the result of forming and maintaining authentic relationships with curators and collaborators. Seeking genuine connection instead of viewing relationships as transactional has led me to form a community with people who identify with the content of my work and seek to uplift my unique voice as an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maxmatherart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/max.math.art/