Max Telos makes design, art, and research as a single practice, working across identity systems, installation, video, writing and more. Their method is inquiry-based and theoretically grounded, producing work that functions in institutional and subcultural spaces in equal measure.

They co-founded and run the studio Eros Works with Collin Fletcher and Matt Baquet.

Summary
Full jacket design for Abigail Susik's forthcoming monograph on Leonora Carrington, with Eberhardt Press.
Year
2026
Client
Eberhardt Press
Summary
A generative brand system for Phoenix's hottest cultural festival, built on the premise that a city's identity lives when we get together.
Year
2026
Client
VIVA PHX
Summary
Sisters is a neighborhood restaurant and bar in a building with a long history of people making things by hand, the brand carries that forward: warm, considered, and real.
Year
2025
Client
Sisters
Summary
Founding identity for the Southwest's best new music venue in a historic building, abstracting its history without nostalgia.
Year
2025
Client
La Rosa
Summary
Collage and new media work excavating the relationship between photographic history and contemporary surveillance tools
Year
2020
Summary
Boys Club is a body of collage about masculinity, discipline and punishment.
Year
2020
Summary
Occult illustration, installation and design for a festival CVLTNation called "the best fest you'll ever go to"
Year
2019
Client
HOCO Fest
Year
2019
Summary
album artwork and packaging for The Lasso's album The Sound of Lasso
Year
2018
Client
Mello Music Group
Summary
Mutli-facet project focusing on development, gentrification and urban geography of the Southwest
Year
2018
Facet
method — 8 projects
Scope
Error and tool-limits as aperture. Glitch, for me, is about exploiting a tool or medium's own substance, infrastructure, or failure (compression vectors, datamosh, print texture and ink bleed) treated as structural part of the content.
Facet
method — 16 projects
Scope
Overlapping two or more disparate registers against each other intentionally without resolution--meaning emerges in the layering of vantage, time, or context.
Facet
method — 25 projects
Scope
My method of bringing in broad referential fields as material; an intentional relationship to the encoded meaning of a work by explicitly including the various threads which lead to its existence.
Facet
method — 14 projects
Scope
Works as territories composed of disparate, sometimes contradictory inputs brought into relation; constellations over fixed singular objects, especially where there can be evolution of a work over time.
Facet
method — 19 projects
Scope
Work made through questioning and research as the primary mode: what a thing is doing? what thought produced its form? what infrastructure sustains it? what is the legacy that brought us this thing? etc.
Facet
theme — 21 projects
Scope
Time-depth, memorial, inheritance, and the presence of the past as explicit subject matter. Includes hauntological registers.
Maps to
lcc:NX650 'History in the arts'
Facet
theme — 19 projects
Scope
Works that deal with their material directly, as distinct from works that merely consist of it. Works whose subject matter is at least partly their medium/material.
Facet
theme — 6 projects
Scope
Works with reverence, sacredness, or devotional attention as a structuring mode.
Maps to
lcsh:sh85148563 'Worship'
Facet
theme — 17 projects
Scope
Works which are fundamentally situated in geography, place, region or locale.
Maps to
lcc:NX650.P52 'Place (Philosophy)'
Facet
theme — 5 projects
Scope
Works which are made from (or are themselves) operable systems, particularly grids, semantic color, geometrically defined graphics, and scripts.
Maps to
lcc:B105.O7 'Order'; alt lcc:B105.R85 'Rules'
Facet
theme — 2 projects
Scope
Works which employ controlled vocabularies, protocols, and formal standards as creative material or formal inspiration.
Maps to
lcc:B105.N65 'Norm'
Facet
theme — 1 project
Scope
Seriality, the loop; repetition as formal device and meaning making tool.
Maps to
lcc:NX650 'Repetition'
Facet
theme — 3 projects
Scope
Translating an idea into a formal mathematical structure and back, or math as a way of visualizing ideas.
Maps to
lcc:NX650 'Mathematics'