When Max Dean was diagnosed with cancer, he did exactly what he always does: he made art out of it

Max Dean is what you'd call a visual thinker. To address a problem, the 71-year-old Toronto-based Governor General's Award-winner likes to illustrate it. This often means constructing elaborate sets, models and machines, which might transform his Polson Pier studio into a surgical theatre one afternoon and a robotics lab the next. Art-making, Dean says, is his way of understanding the world around him.

Of course, then, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he did exactly what he always does: he made art out of it.

The documentary Still Max by Katherine Knight, which premiered last week at Hot Docs, follows Dean and his cast of mannequin helpers — a signature of his practice over the past five years — as he tries to learn what exactly is happening inside his body and what can be done to help him fix it. Through a series of photographic tableaux and various other madcap artistic interventions, involving squirt guns, inflatable sumo suits, anatomical models, some fake blood and a high-stakes game of dice, Dean and friends investigate the artist's treatment options.

Dean was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2011, on his 62nd birthday. (It is a bizarre coincidence that his partner, artist Martha Fleury, was also diagnosed with cancer on her 62nd birthday, and the doc partly pictures this facet of their relationship: companions, both artists, both with cancer.) Dean remembers when the physician told him he had "the big C"; it was like a wave had crashed on him. Then, in the next breath, the doctor said, "So that's the bad news. The good news is you're probably going to die from something else." Dean's cancer is slow-growing. He will likely outlive it. But that also means he's had to learn — and is still learning — how to live with it.

"When a situation presents itself, you can look at it as an obstacle or as an opportunity," Dean says. "And if you choose to look at it as an opportunity, you say, 'What can I make out of this?'" If the artist has an ethos, it is this. Dean sees opportunities.

I first met Dean in September 2016 while reporting on an art festival held in the abandoned Ontario Place theme park. Dean was inspired by the derelict Wilderness Adventure Ride, which was a log flume attraction from the mid-'80s meant to showcase the industries of northern Ontario. He'd found its cast of animatronic figures — miners, lumberjacks, moose — vandalized and badly damaged. So he repaired them and arranged them into an operating room scene (after the Thomas Eakins painting "The Gross Clinic") inside their fibreglass mountain home, as if, after being mothballed so long, the figures had decided to repair themselves.

Shortly after, Dean told me that the mannequins had escaped the park, embarking on a sort of Odyssey to find a new home, and he asked if I would like to help tell their story. Over the past few years, Dean photographed their journeys and I recorded them as exhibition texts, observing as the Wilderness Adventure gang travelled east along the old rail corridor, hiding out at the decommissioned Unilever soap factory, where they built an outsize bubble-blowing machine (which later resulted in a giant floral picture frame commissioned for the Toronto art fair, ArtTO). The project, to me, made urban innovation feel magical and promoted a more participatory, democratic version of city-building.

So I will admit, when the figures began working on Dean's cancer, it threw me for a bit of a loop. The portrait Knight builds in Still Max, however, has helped me fill in the blanks. Art is the tool Dean uses to dissect the world and then reassemble it. At first, the figures were interested in the problems of a larger body — the city — but more recently, they've turned to consider the problems of a smaller one: the artist's own.

"The knife is one of the great tools of all time," Dean says in one memorable scene where he and the mannequin named Tom (after Eakins) are modelling radical prostatectomy. "The fact that you can actually think about cutting a body open and putting it back together, it's a pretty outrageous thought."

Dean has admired Eakins's "The Gross Clinic" since undergrad. The painting pictures Dr. Samuel Gross lecturing a group of medical students while performing surgery for a bone infection. It seems to capture the doctor, scalpel in bloodied glove, caught in reflection. "The principal characters are immersed in this very deep play," Dean says, "where the world falls away and all attention is directed on the activity ... Gross appears to be experiencing this moment of realization, like, 'Here I am in the world doing this.'" The intensity, the focus, the ever-present risk — Dean sees in the painting a metaphor for the work of an artist. Though the stakes do differ, he's long said that "making art is something like running off a cliff, and then, as you're in free fall, making the parachute." You need to find a way to land.

Feeling powerless is a very important thing because how do you know when you do have power if you don't know what powerlessness is?- Max Dean in Still Max

Still Max develops the notion that for someone like Dean, art-making is not just a livelihood but a way of being alive. Knight says she's attracted to artists deeply bound with their work, who might also have something larger to say about life — "something that can make your own life better." With Dean, it's these lines she remembers most: "If you're open to stuff, it's going to present itself. if you're tight and tense, the world senses that and stays away." The artist exemplifies how curiosity and playfulness are qualities we needn't grow out of; in fact, you can commit yourself to them entirely.

The film crescendos as Dean builds a replica of his tumour. It begins about the size of a walnut and grows with layers of hair and wire and clothing and books into a mountain as large as his studio. What does one do when facing a problem so large? How do you address an issue that consumes so much of your life? Naturally, the artist's final act is to cut it open.

Still Max is available to stream as part of Hot Docs through May 9. The Max Dean exhibition Still - Living through Cancer and COVID is currently on view at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and online.