Forward from Three Fools Press e-book Edition of  Max Skeans'
25 Light Years from Home (Picking up The Pieces)

Eyes raised above you, obscured by constellations of those who have come before, Max Skeans’ work strikes immediately. “I have seen that before.” Not the mall porn surrealist photo manifestos enabled by transgressed graphical usership. “That one guy who makes those calendars…” with “.95” in the price. Grabbed from the impulse purchase rack, the calendars. But before. Somewhere at the moment cortical paradigms unravel. Where weaponry, religion and sex align horizontal. Where the grotesque curiosity of an OB/GYN stirrup table unfolds. The moment the manifest folk stroke of graffiti art projects through the tinted windows of your car, ten miles per second per second. Until. The gravity of Skeans’ imagery snaps you back. No discernable descent, no landing. Until. He casts constellations, and assures, that time steals the light. That the event horizon is merely, the tidy edge of our own visual cuneiforms. Until, he exposes purpose in our vernacular. Purpose in our visual refuse. Reminds, that at some point, the stars,  simply. Will quit.

     Max Skeans is from another time. The closest thing I can even mark to where his trek aligns with mine, would be the 1970’s, his taste for punk music. Fully, two decades ahead of me, his lens has churned through the atrocity exhibits of Vietnam and Cambodia. Freelance agency for The Associated Press. The squiggly halls of Museum of Modern Art. Hands on the wheel for Hunter S. Thompson in Florida where he taught, and the very large chip on his shoulder, queen blue, Robert Mapplethorpe, his friend. Cincinnati village damned in his resume, though he is wise in his work and in his life, to remain close.
     Max was fully ground through the machinery of 1960’s idealism, and I know few people my age, that find him as anything more than a surrealist who keeps doing it because, as his generation also demands, he must feel, or quite actually owe, a debt to some other time. Twenty five years of working is a long time to have not mastered anything of yourself. Twenty five years is a long time to keep doing the same thing over and again. No one my age has ever worked at a factory for twenty five years, and never will. What’s more, critical exploration of Skeans’ work exacerbates the arrival of any proven approach. The contemporary criticism transcribed from anachronistic “surreal” to say---that he “deconstructs”. I have found, and stand by, otherwise. That it is this simple; you can’t have Skeans unless you thrive where very visceral everyday visual language presents itself and persists. You can’t have Skeans, an anachronism, because of the presumed convenience of the visual language he draws from. Max Skeans shoots, and has always, in our time.
      If you were unfamiliar with Skeans’ work, receiving this work alone, without the compliment of his web site, his feature on our site (semantikon.com/medium.htm) in early 2004, then much is in store. If you browsed his feature on our site, are informed, then some of the enigma of Max has built up, will be relieved. As in this excerpt, we find Skeans, looking back and forwards, parting words. Changing mass, into energy.

As above, so below.