BIOGRAPHY
Evan Elzie Maddox (b.1999) is an American new media artist and organizer based in the Midwest. Her work utilizes cartoon imagery as a medium to elevate underrepresented ideas and themes within the transgender experience. Maddox is known for her use of print media, experimental video, performance, installation, and event planning.
Much of her work contains allusions to broadcast television, quantum physics, and conspiracy theories. Her creative process is grounded in archival research, community engagement, and lived experience. She is influenced by the work of Andy Warhol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Pippa Garner, and Matt Groening. Maddox studied Filmmaking and Entrepreneurial Studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in 2022.
She has been featured in national and local galleries, underground venues, public transit shelters, and retail storefronts. Maddox has also participated in a variety of art festivals and self-publishing conferences such as the Midwest Queer & Trans Zine Fest. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Artist Relief Fund, a 2025-2026 Rocket Grant, and has been awarded artist residencies at the Ox-Bow School of Art, Po()inator, and Alter Artspace. Her artworks and publications are in the permanent collections at the Gay & Lesbian Archives of Mid-America (GLAMA), and the Kansas City Public Library.
Maddox is a member of the Radical Intersectional Printmaker’s Guild and is a Founding Member of the Oracle Zine Team and People’s Pride KC. She is also involved in various subcultures, non-profits, and artist-run projects across the Midwest. She has worked as an Instructional Assistant at the Kansas City Art Institute from 2022-2025. She currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri where she works as a full-time artist and organizer.
STATEMENT
“My work explores feelings of social anxiety, paranoia, and discovery related to my gender transition. Throughout this process, I have sought comfort in late-night television, queer history, grassroots community, and within the Triangle Head Universe. The Triangle Heads are fictitious beings created by appropriating the Illuminati symbol of the “all-seeing eye” and placing it onto a humanoid figure to represent notions of self-consciousness, self-awareness, and self-empowerment. This multimedia paracosm, informed by my observations and identity, celebrates colorful characters and speculative futures. Growing up in a religious homeschool environment, access to pop culture and mainstream media was heavily restricted. During this time, I felt incredibly isolated in my queerness, and it wasn’t until I immersed myself in the arts that I began to envision a future for myself. The strategies of oppression and erasure used against (my) queerness that I endured during my upbringing motivates me to create physical and illustrated spaces, objects, characters, and experiences that allow for queerness to exist openly. By collaging the aesthetics of New Age science and technologies, occult symbolism, technicolor films, cartoon media, as well as capitalist/consumerist critique, I have constructed a Universe that whimsically represents my own desire for knowledge, the questioning of self, and the existential realization upon discovering that All Is Not As It Seems. Despite these social institutions often being used to justify prejudice, censorship, and violence, I intentionally work in opposition to these systems to depict a reality beyond imagination. Embracing these controversial aesthetics through parody and satire, depicts another way that the world around us is infinitely complex and wonderfully weird. I hope this body of work will playfully provoke viewers to investigate societal absurdities, the relationships with ourselves and to one another, and to collectively visualize a liberated queer future.”