Joseph Maida’s prolific vision is campy, full of fantasy and critique of contemporary material culture. He shakes up national and cultural references, often relying on cliche and wordplay in the titles for success. The use of absurd juxtapositions, as well as the tinkering with perception and scale were prompted by a 1973 Duane Michals photographic work, which employs some similar strategies.”
Susan Bright, Feast for the Eyes The Story of Food in Photography, Aperture, 2017
Maida’s colorful sculptures exhibit a matter-of-fact, documentary-style that seems to suggest that the world is queer because it is observed in fragments of a larger picture and that the queerness lies not in the things themselves, but in the surety by which we label them as normal or abnormal.
Rachel Lowry, Time Lightbox, Sept 15, 2016
The New York based photographer Joseph Maida also questions who and what belongs in the kitchen in his 2014 “Things ‘R’ Queer,” a series of gelatin, meringue and plastic tableaus: a gelatin birthday cake atop a tennis racket, a fake hamburger with an electricity meter attached to it. They are, he writes, “historically ‘straight’ in their aesthetics and lack of manipulation” but “undoubtedly queer in their campy visualization of a fantasy-cum-critique of contemporary material culture.”
Emma Orlow, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, August 30, 2019
The Worlds Funny Instagrammers — @josephmaida
Ima Magazine, Spring 2017
