Frankie May: Everyday Life Revolution

Frankie May’s work investigates the fragility and absurdity of human perception under the heavy weight of social norms and ideological conditioning. Through body performance, experimental photography, and video installations, he creates elements that escape the expectations of normalized society, confronting the viewer directly with what is overlooked, repressed, and irrationalMay declares his practice under the banner of a “Everyday Life Revolution,” a conceptual rebellion against the de-individualized conditions of contemporary existence. He believes that capitalism and authoritarian politics jointly produce a widespread poverty of affect, leading to the proletarianization of human capacity. In response, his work attempts to engineer moments of perceptual disruption across the dimensions of time, inner emotion, spatial awareness, and ritualistic worship, in order to pry open the symbolic order and search for its cracks.

Humor and absurdity lie at the core of his practice, not as comic relief, but as destabilizing tools; strategies for short-circuiting passive perception and exposing the mental lethargy embedded in everyday life. He is deeply influenced by the traditions of Dada and Fluxus, which remind us that nonsense often speaks more powerfully than logic.

May’s goal is not to provide answers or comfort. Rather, he stages encounters, often provocative and uncomfortable, that demand the body and the senses to think. In the face of rigid order, he believes absurdity and deconstruction are, in themselves, political acts.

Frankie May was born in Ningbo, China, and lived and worked in Hangzhou and Shanghai China for 10 years. He moved to Winnipeg in 2023 to enter the Master of Fine Art program at University of Manitoba. He was a participant in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute 2024.