Max Puchalsky

Level Four Pain Patch

Digital embroidery on organza

“This year, after I was diagnosed with a rare bone disease, I attended many doctor’s appointments where I was asked to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. My answer tended to be 'four,' which is associated with the expression on this embroidered patch.

The patch appropriates a pictograph from the Wong-Baker pain rating scale, whose series of proto-emoji faces are themselves based on aggregated depictions of pain in children's drawings. Level four pain is considered moderate pain, which interferes significantly with daily living. When deeply involved in activity, it can be ignored for a period of time, but the pain is enough that adaptation to it is impossible—a slow, incessant gnawing, banal in its perniciousness.”

— Max Puchalsky

About the artist

Max Puchalsky

American

My background in visual art, music, community organizing, and social science informs the hybrid nature of my artistic research. Working predominately across new media and social practice, a recurring, formal characteristic of my work is the subversion of technology—often cast as a distancing agent—to facilitate intimate understandings and responses. I understand technology, or techné, in its ancient sense, as inclusive of both social technics and the ethical frameworks through which technologies come into being. In light of this, my works in games, video, sound, print media, photography, text, software, and installation environments take the social conditions they produce into equal account as their spatial configurations of images and objects. Recently, I have become inspired by new research that frames the utopian imaginary not as a fixed end state, but rather as a methodology that can be democratically cultivated. As such, my current work is rooted in developing rehearsals for this process. To this end, I embrace collaboration and collective authorship reflective of the degree to which cultural production is always already grounded in a web of interrelations and mutualities of being. Each piece begins as a research project that explores solidarity economics, liberatory technologies, (more-than)human ethics, and other social ecological territories. I then deploy various devices—absurdity, nostalgia, pop culture, ambient sound, sublime imagery—to disarm viewers and allow them to approach the more serious subject matter embedded within. Through this syncretic and discursive approach, I (re)organize sensory information to empower people to see and feel in new ways.