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To get you hyped for the anthology, we're bringing you an interview with one of our invited artists, Max Banshees! Content warning for possible disturbing art below.
We’d love if you could introduce yourself and tell us more about what kind of art you make.
My name is Max Banshees. I’m a Colombian artist living in Massachusetts.
Primarily, I make prints, comics, and book illustrations. These works focus on love, pain, intertwinedness, and repetition. Many of them also take into account the materiality and history (real, or invented) of the objects themselves.
What is your connection to horror as a genre? What compels you to continue making art within the paradigm of horror?
The ‘time’ component is what compels me the most about horror. Images, words, sensations, and scenes can ferment, rot, and even explode. The creation or experience of a work can start out slow and cautious and unsure until, suddenly, a horrific realization hits you. Other works are more quiet, more insidious, taking days, weeks, months, and even years to truly haunt you. A similar component in horror is unreality: events happen, but they also don’t happen, not literally, not fully, not directly, and the things that are never shown sometimes have more of a lasting effect than what is shown.
While this can apply to other genres– like tragedy, romance, narrative poetry, and writing about writing itself– it has been most impactful to me in the context of works that are categorized as (or that take advantage of aspects from) horror.
Talk a little about your creative philosophy. What keeps you making art?
Besides how incredible– and alarming– it is to be affected by a work of art, I’m also interested in how volatile that experience can be. We can be unhappy with something we’ve made or found today, just for it to be an important milestone, or catalyst, or lens for something else tomorrow. Basically, I love that the journey of making and discovering art is never really done.
What other work is your art in conversation with? Could be any medium, inspirational or bad work that you’re kind of responding to.
Recently, I’ve been reading and illustrating works by South American authors who focus on horror, mystery, and/or magic realism. Borges (‘The Theologians’ & ‘Three Versions of Judas’) and Bazterrica (‘Tender Is The Flesh’) have been incredible, and are names that many readers of these genres might recognize. However, I did want to highlight Caio Fernando Abreu’s ‘A Story of Butterflies’. A fellow writer and constant inspiration– Francis Tanatologia– was generous enough to translate it from Brazilian Portuguese into English, and it has really stuck with me.
‘A Story of Butterflies’ is about a pair of people whose lives spiral out of control after they begin to grow butterflies from their scalps. Like many of Abreu’s works, this story is rough, embarrassing, specific, and human at the same time that it is incorporeal and beautiful. The interplay between the ambient existential horror, the tangible body horror, and the reality of the narrator’s life is what creates that simultaneous experience. It’s a work that will influence the visual and narrative aspects of my art for a long time. (I can still feel the sensation of the narrator plucking the butterflies from his hair…)
Can you tell us about your newest projects/projects you have in development? Feel free to plug anything here as well eg. socials, website, etc.
Currently, I’m working on a series of prints that highlight the artifacts and damage that they’ve collected throughout their histories. Some of these are cyanotypes, toned so that they resemble antique salt prints. Others are fire-damaged or torn prints. A few are old school B&W copier zines and incomplete sets of playing cards.
