Queer Trash Presents: Max Hamel

Friday, April 12th, Queer Trash is thrilled to present Madsen Minax, Max Hamel, and Reagan Holiday for an evening of gender blur, noise, abstraction, and intimate electricity. Returning to ISSUE following their 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, Queer Trash presents a varied night of drag, noise, and video, with three artists who often come in bodily contact with the technologies they employ.

Madsen Minax presents a new film incorporating live sound and projected video. An interdisciplinary artist whose work is influenced by his participation in justice-oriented communities, Minax’s To Run, To Play Dead queers how intimacy and friendship can unfold between rural boys. The evening also features Max Hamel, known for their prolific output as Head Separating From Body, where the inputs and outputs of their modular synth are switchable, nonbinary, and fluid. Further, the sound is activated by touch, so the artist’s body completes the circuit. Drag performance artist and musician Reagan Holiday performs high femme harsh noise for the apocalypse. Full on, full drag, full volume.

Queer Trash celebrates the potential for noise to be a process that undoes fixed meanings, upsets hierarchies, and collapses socially constructed order. In information and communication theory, noise is the unwanted and inevitable travelling companion of signal. In this definition noise interferes with signal that is considered right and true, and noise itself has no independent meaning. Noise, to Queer Trash, is so much more exciting than that. These artists flip the dominant codes and focus on the noise, the excess, the stuff that’s trash to heteronormative culture. For Queer Trash, noise is totally queer.

Queer theory diva Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it beautifully: “That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.”

Max Hamel (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist with practices spanning improvisational performance, composition, sculpture, and instrument building. They craft textural sound collages using a web of idiosyncratic, interconnected synthesizers that are centered around chaos, feedback, and touch. Max has performed and released work under the name Head Separating From Body, and has collaborated with an assortment of performers including Al Margolis, Crank Sturgeon, Zach Rowden, Jen Kutler, and Matt Norman. They are based out of the northeast United States and have performed in galleries and performance spaces such as the Darling Foundry in Montreal, Quebec and Basilica Hudson in Hudson, NY.