Maddie Butler is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work seeks to understand how mechanisms of intimacy (mal)function in a society of ever-shifting selves. She isolates components of “the self” – the psychological, the spiritual, the physical, the digital – and manipulates them into imagined narratives of desire and distance. Highly interdisciplinary, her practice tests how social dynamics function in “unreal” or highly affected environments (the stage, the dream, the club, the memory). Through this process she proposes a new ethics of inner life.
Butler was raised on an island in a lake in Minnesota. She received a BA in sculpture from Yale University and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California San Diego. While in Skagaströnd she will be editing a new video piece and petting as many Icelandic horses as possible.