IMPOSSIBLE_SCAPES

A Selection of Films by Madsen Minax

Forward Into the Afternoon: After an instructional road trip to the ocean a figure communes with stray dogs to build seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains, and nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.

My Most Handsome Monster documents two separate BDSM scenarios and morphs the landscapes in which they take place. The scenarios collide with archival family footage, landscape meditation, and voice-over narration to suggest a state of suspended engagement, a state of waiting, a gesture toward both collective histories and imagined futures.

Set in a post-industrial “Neverland” of worn-down row houses, looming factories, and desolate seashores, a rabble of disenfranchised gender and age ambiguous youths explore their own vulnerabilities and put pressure on what it means to grow up. Misadventures, which include impromptu races, nighttime spooning, cheating card games, attempts at hypnotism, pocketknife haircuts, and sexual fantasies, all function as a means for the characters to attempt knowing one another. Through a series of vignettes, The Year I Broke My Voice offers an alternative perspective on coming of age that emphasizes perpetual states of becoming over conventions of linear development into adulthood.

Madsen Minax received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), an MFA from Northwestern University (2012), was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012–14), and was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Madsen’s works have shown at REDCAT in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York, Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, the British Film Institute in London, and the public Library of Amsterdam. Additionally works have aired on national and international television, including PBS and CBC. Madsen is currently a visiting faculty member at the University of Memphis.