Aug - Oct 2025
Max Nordile: Janitor of the Seasons
Max Nordile (b. 1982, San Diego CA) is a multidisciplinary artist living in Olympia, WA. His visual art practice deals in multi-media assemblage; appropriating found objects into three dimensional sculptures for the wall and floor. Nordile’s musical practice is much the same, utilizing found sounds and field recordings to recontextualize and obfuscate their origin within freely improvised studio play. As a musician, he has both performed and recorded extensively in numerous bands and solo projects - in addition to having curated events and toured throughout the United States consistently since 2004. Nordile has released albums on Gilgongo Records, Post Present Medium, Radical Documents, PHYSICAL, Regional Bears, and Music For People (the artist's own label). Funny Pages, selections from a decade of Nordile’s sketchbooks, was published by 24/7 Press and from 2013-2023 Nordile self-published 40 issues of Droppings: An Art and Humor Magazine. His visual art has been exhibited widely including exhibitions at TCMoFA (Olympia WA), Store Front Gallery (Oakland CA), Silent Barn (Brooklyn), 24/7 Gallery (Seattle), AK Gallery (Seaside OR), and The Space (NYC).
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Janus (‘door-jamb’), son of Ouranos and Hecate, brother of Cronus, father of the Hours siblings, stands columnar at the threshold of Olympus. In endless repetition, he is a custodian of a single moment in time: when the old season turns into the new.
Born of a ball of mud that bounced down a crevice in the Earth, Janus was nurtured on offal and grubs as a rugrat. He escaped Inner Earth to the River Styx and floated his way to the Upper World. Warming under the Sun’s rays, he began to sprout multitudinous body parts. In a hideously mutated state and feared by local villagers, he lived in a self-imposed hermitage. Eventually (700 years later), he was accepted as a harmless forest lurker. However, after sheltering his half-brother Cronus from the Gods during their war with the Titans, he was assaulted by thunder-bolts. In return for mercy, he squealed like a pig, revealing Cronus to the Gods. Upon capture, the Titans were exiled to the Islands Of The Blessed, but Janus got bumped up to the Heavens, spared, but punished for his treachery. They cut his faces down to only two and made him immobile, a pillar on the doorstep of time. He remains alienated from his labor to this day, a midwife of historical effluvium. From nursery to effigy, he’s seen it all, and all at once.
“Immortality is kinda a drag, man - having to stare simultaneously at the past and the future. But better than the alternative I guess, and anyway, I get to actually use my faces. This way, there IS no verso. Decent work if you can get it!”