Maxx Aguilar

Media Arts & Sciences major

Maxx Aguilar is a product designer and multidisciplinary artist who works with a variety of media such as drawing, painting, printmaking, digital imaging, photography, music, metal working, and fashion design. They were born and raised in Chicago, land that has been part of the territories of Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Myaamia, Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi), Kaskaskia, Peoria, and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) nations since prior to European colonization. Their ancestry is inclusive of their maternal Black American heritage and paternal Panamanian family. In their work, their experience as a Black latine transgender person is a starting point for exploring themes of transformation and healing. By denouncing structures of the status quo, they are able to build worlds that reach forward toward the future while maintaining a historical awareness that navigates inherited trauma.

Inmaduro

acrylic on canvas

Jewett Hallway Galleries

horizontal painting of two people with sculptural faces looking up from among many banana trees; a large purplish plant bud hangs down between them

Nicotiana

acrylic on gessoed tempered masonite

Jewett Hallway Galleries

painting of nude kneeling, back to the viewer, with short red spikey hair; red lines travel down from their hair over the planes of their face; they hold up a hand and look at it as the fingers turn into green stems; green vegetation in the background

In this body of work, spiritual unity across human and plant consciousness is illustrated by the theme of transformation. As described by African cosmology, all aspects of life have their own consciousness guided by forces of nature. Photosynthetic growth and the evolution of the figures are metaphors for spiritual alignment, healing, and Black transgender liberation. Through herbalism and ethnobotanical practices we are able to access healing and communicate with the natural world.

As the inflorescence of the plants grow, the figures intensely gaze at the budding genitalia as their own transformation takes place. Their gaze then becomes a growing sense of anticipation for the future, alluding to the experience of second puberty. An example of the figures' transformation is the hand in Nicotiana that has fingers branching off in a pattern similar to the growth structure of the Nicotiana species. These paintings are moments in time leading up to a final culmination where the figure and plant physically become one. This endpoint represents spiritual unity with the natural world and becoming one with God.

Black people exist under imposed structures of gender that were part of our ways of thinking prior to colonization and enslavement. Even the scientific language we use to describe and understand our environment is impacted by these structures. In this work, the process of liberation through transformation includes expanding gender and sex beyond the antiquated association with biology.

The figures are intentionally placed in monoculture settings to reference the reality of labor that clouds our historical relationship to the land. Black and brown populations have been forced to work the fields and practice unsustainable western agricultural practices in the name of efficiency and consumerism. We have been traumatized and brutalized through our relationships with the natural world, but the sacredness of these relationships shall be restored.

detail of painting where fingers transform into green plant stems with red flower buds

close up on painting of two faces and flower bud showing color layers and hatching

two paintings against a gray fabric wall; at left, small horizontal painting of two figures; at right, larger vertical painting of kneeling figure; the right-hand painting is propped up on a black pedestal

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