Max Devereaux

Biography

Max Devereaux (b. 1994) is an American artist, musician, and filmmaker whose work moves fluidly between sound, image, and performance. Raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was shaped by the city’s cultural fabric—its museums, concert halls, and historic movie theaters—which sparked an early fascination with storytelling across forms. Largely self-taught, he developed his practice outside academia through obsessive study and hands-on experimentation. Devereaux’s work is defined by its range and intensity. His output spans experimental improvisation, indie country, outsider film, abstract painting, ikebana flower arranging, and electroacoustic composition. Often these modes converge into hybrid, cross-disciplinary forms that resist easy categorization. Guided more by intuition and lo-fi aesthetics than by formal training, he has built a practice centered on invention and personal mythology. His filmmaking career has unfolded in distinct phases. As a teenager, he created stop-motion animations and music videos; in his late teens and early twenties, he turned to short narrative films. By the age of thirty, his focus had shifted decisively to experimental cinema and free improvisation, rejecting conventional storytelling in favor of accident, blur, and fracture. Parallel to his film work, Devereaux has released music with independent labels in Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Canada, the United States, Belgium, Poland, and the United Kingdom, positioning him within a wider international avant-garde community. His visual art has followed a similar trajectory: in 2024, he presented a solo exhibition at M.A.P. Gallery in Tokyo’s Koenji district, while his films have been screened at festivals and multimedia events in Japan and abroad. Now based between Southern California and Minneapolis, Devereaux continues to pursue a cross-media approach. His projects are less concerned with fixed outcomes than with creating spaces of perception and attention. In this way, his work participates in a larger experimental tradition while remaining singular in its voice, its poetics, and its restless search for new forms.