FELIX ART FAIR 2024
WILL MAXEN // I'LL BE WITH YOU AS YOU GO
HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT SUITE 212
Residency Art Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the 2024 edition of Felix Art Fair. This year, we are ecstatic to present Will Maxen's project I'll Be With You as You Go. Works included show an intimate look in the life of a mixed-race Jewish American family, referencing archival images that capture private family moments such as holidays, vacations and birthday parties. Maxen was recently featured in our New Contemporaries Vol 3 in the fall of 2023 here at Residency. Felix Art Fair will take place on February 28 through March 3 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the Cabana Suite 212. Please note that our booth is located on the second floor of the cabana suites. Be sure to join us for LA's Art Week!
I’ll Be With You As You Go, is a selection of new work by Will Maxen that explores the dynamics of intimacy, through the portrayal of family scenes: birthdays, holidays, vacations. Maxen draws on archival images as well as personal, collective, and historical memories, to engage the tensions that suffuse modern American life, and in particular, the life of a mixed-race Jewish American family. In the paintings, the solid and the fluid, the opaque and the translucent, mark the dynamic edges of what remains beyond language.
The figures are luminous; they drip and blend between foreground and background. Their backgrounds and surroundings appear also to constitute them. Maxen’s mark making mixes control with release, forcing a confrontation between a realist tradition of precision and control with the realities of oil paint’s material nature. Like memory, itself an unreliable process mixed with fact and feeling, the paint in these works moves ever slightly out of control. It agrees to some gestures, but not with any perfect fidelity. It can serve a subjectivity, but only for so long. Ultimately it goes where it needs to go.
Will Maxen is a visual artist born and raised in Waterbury, CT. His work delves into the complexities of the mixed-race experience, drawing from personal and historical experiences to explore the connections between memory, environment, and belonging. His paintings, often ghost-like in quality, challenge societal boundaries and create dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations.
Maxen holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BA in illustration from Central Connecticut State University. He has exhibited his work at Residency Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Chili Art Projects, London; Faith J. McKinney Gallery, Sacramento; the Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis; and the Museum of Northern California Art, Chico. Maxen is currently an Artist in Residence at Silver Art Project in New York City.