In the mixed-media works of his exhibition “Neo-American Transcendental,” Michael Maxwell employs materials ranging from the prehistoric to the digital. Clay, natural mineral pigments, plant dyes, wheat paste, quartz crystal, silver and gold leaf, beeswax, encaustic, and oil and acrylic paint, are all applied on top of, or amongst, digitally-created scenes or patterns. Viewed as a maximalist’s take on primitive mark-making or a historically-minded Abstract Expressionism, Maxwell’s work deserves attention, but where his work truly stands out is in his handling of the digital. Like other artists who have successfully incorporated it into their work, Maxwell’s is not “about” the computer. Maxwell takes the computer—one of the biggest influences on contemporary art and painting—and folds it into something earthen and materially complex, brilliantly enhancing our sensitivity to it.

In several of his works, like Blue Hole Excursion (2018), Maxwell has “painted” onto large prints of nature scenes. They’re not simply photographs, though. The scenes are digitally-created composites of smaller images and it’s clear he wants you to see the stitches of the minor misalignments. By transitioning his brushstrokes from appearing flat on the surface to entering the third dimension of the photograph, Maxwell pulls the digital construction of space into his shamanistic stirring of materials. In other works, like In the Morning Light Many Things Seem Possible (2018), he’s affixed cutouts of digitally-produced patterns to his compositions—there, too, the direction and texture of his brushstrokes respond to the patterns of the digital prints, appearing to vibrate at resonant frequencies. Even when he’s not literally using the digital, his works subtly reference its aesthetic: often they feature groups of parallel marks that seem to align to an invisible structure, just barely suggesting a loose or nascent grid.

Maxwell situates his digital elements beautifully amongst other dynamic features and textures of pivoting functions. His loose-grid marks resemble rudimentary symbols, especially when they intersect to form crosses, asterisks and diamonds, which jangle as they hang askew in space. Many marks also appear to glow or expand, due to their soft edges and multiple outlines of successive color. From afar, the surfaces look like they have been eroded or torn away, but at the same time, especially in Tiffany (2018), the proliferation of marks appear to have overgrown the bones of an underlying image, almost like a corrupted digital image might leave behind remnants of a visual structure.

Emerging alongside the varied effects of his surfaces, the mold and dust of his palette, the glitches and electric pink, and the religious glow of gold leaf, is a strong sense of prehistory and of the human story. The digital, in Maxwell’s vision of the natural world, shares the same space as earthen and old-world materials, which are literally cracking on the surface and crumbling off the canvas. Under the trance of “Neo-American Transcendental,” the digital—the non-physical realm where we store our lives—slowly slips into tomorrow’s old dreams. 

Named after Pablo Neruda’s epic poem on the history of the Americas, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s own “General Song” harmonizes with its Lantinx perspective; his two series of photographs, “Barricades” and “Masks,” confront social issues like immigration and revolt while meditating on the medium of photography.

The primer-white and paint-chipped scenes of “Barricades” exist in simultaneous construction and dismantling, both in material and in concept. The foreground objects of “Barricades” build off, and extend into, a large photograph affixed to the wall, showing how they were arranged in a previous moment (captured in the photograph). “Barricades,” a series that ruminates on the artistic process and object perception, raises more nuanced questions about photography and complicates our relationship to it.

Even though the mechanics of a photograph (recording a single moment) make it resistant to showing the sequence of its own becoming, Valenzuela’s “Barricades” exhibit an artistic process we might expect of other, physical media, but still maintain the temporal precision characteristic of photography. The inner and foreground scenes, with their reused and rearranged objects, suggest a brief increment of time, yet their objects rest on each other as if no time separated them at all. “Barricades” are simultaneously breaking the moment in two and mending it back together.

Photography, too, maybe because it can preserve a moment otherwise lost to time, carries with it a certain sentimentality, or at least the blueprint for it. As a photograph is intended to store visual information as close as possible to our own visual experience, the more accurate the photograph, the more it invites the viewer to enter its space—to reclaim a past moment. “Barricades” sabotages that natural response. The series leads the eye, tricks the mind, and asks the viewer to step inward through the planes of the image, into the interval of time suspended between the foreground and inner photo (perhaps even into the solitary realm of the artist’s process). But at the same time, they obstruct. In the details in the periphery, Valenzuela deliberately reveals the illusion, almost forcing us to admit: we want to be deceived.

In both “Masks” and “Barricades,” Valenzuela employs art’s unique ability to connote multiple ideas and feelings without actually declaring what it is, or even being something at all. And he orchestrates those connotations in such a way that the interactions between them create the ineffable experiences that his audience, as art-makers and viewers alike, should seek out of art. With “Masks,” a series of tenebrous but electric portraits of mud-covered men wearing makeshift respirators, Valenzuela somehow achieves this with political and social issues, where voices are often so strident that they stifle the viewer’s ability and willingness to explore or experience different ideas—especially in today’s political climate. While others might equip politically-charged objects to incite, Valenzuela’s mastery of detail and ambiguity instead cultivates a sensitivity and awareness. In an air of riot and ritual, “Masks” enables the viewer to commune with the subjugated and the defiant, the hopeful, the indigenous, the dead.