Cap

Featured Artist: Max King Cap

Artist Statement

Being strictly committed to nonfiction I create no work that is wholly for optical amusement. My work is a form of metaphoric journalism, more in line with Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and Golub’s White Squad V. If artists can be described as having a visual compass then mine is drawn distinctly toward reality, and the better angels of our nature have no role in the narratives that I transcribe.

These images are not concocted to inspire joy but outrage. They are the receipts of our greed, selfishness, and indifference. They are always self-portraits but I am the stand-in for us, because there is plenty of guilt to go around. We have the privilege of ignoring our complicity in disaster. How much did your blue jeans cost? Did you add in the poverty of those who earn miniscule wages to make them, the sexual assault that also goes with sweat shop labor, the dangerous conditions they are daily forced to endure? Have you asked why other countries fund their schools equally while here in the United States the bigotry of county and city governments are allowed to lavish services on some school districts and starve others? Why are our prisons so overfilled, turned into profit centers, and willfully dismissive of rehabilitation?

Because out of sight is out of mind is out of my control is not my fault is I’m glad it isn’t me.

I suggest we can do better. I suggest that selfishness is not natural but antithetical to our nature, we have simply been hypnotized by greed and comfort. That is why my self-portraits depict me as a tyrant—I know I possess the urge and must resist it fiercely; that is why I count the number of incarcerated days of those falsely imprisoned—because if it happened to them it can happen to me. And you may think it impossible but it can also happen to you. Some of the incarcerated in my Captive series are law-abiding Asian men, others are educated White women. Justice is not blind, but it is lazy and over-worked and subject to disastrous mistakes; mistakes that sometimes take decades to undo, and some can never be undone.

Artist Biography

Max King Cap is a visual artist from Chicago who now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been seen in galleries and museums in Vienna, New York, Stuttgart and numerous other cities in Europe and the US. He is also a writer whose work has appeared in The Racial Imaginary, The Puritan, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, and Hippocampus. He earned his MFA from the University of Chicago, his doctorate from the University of Southern California, and has taught at Columbia College Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Pitzer College.