Maximalism and cluttercore have come under fire recently as "pathological," but here at The Spiral Lab we reject the pathology paradigm--even for design styles!

Minimalism is often offered up as the ultimate "life hack" for ADHDers, and as an almost neurologically predetermined preference for Autistics, but in this livestream, we mean to debunk those myths! Marta sat down with Paint and John, two friends from the DDS online community, to talk about how and why maximalism really works to create pleasure and function in our lives and homes.

Paint is a queer disabled artist and poet, in the never ending process of healing PTSD and discovering new ways to create and live authentically. They have an educational background in disability studies and he currently lives fun-employed as a full-time disabled person unmasking and rediscovering safety in life.

Check out Paint's merch and their website here.

John is a writer, rhetor, teacher, street photographer, and antipoverty activist, born in NYC and living now in Denver, CO. He recently survived a stroke, which took with it a not insignificant chunk of his sense of proprioception. More recently, he was diagnosed with ADHD, which has occasioned a sometimes overwhelming, sometimes exhilarating, almost always exhausting process of re-understanding why and how he is who he is.

Read John’s piece about his antipoverty activism and check out some of his street photography and found poetry.

If you’d like to see the art styles and trends we’re talking about, check out the video of this conversation on our Youtube channel.

FURTHER READING:

* The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture, The New Yorker

* Why the West is Afraid of Color, The Juggernaut

* Why Everything Is So Ugly by Mina Le

* Alidad’s Maximalist Home

* The Perils of Diagnosing Modernists, Bloomberg

* Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry Into What Women Saved and Assembled, Art Critical