statement | mckendree key

" We live on the same planet. The fact is we can't escape our body. That's all we have." -Ernesto Neto

" Everything...conspired to skew one's expectations, to raise some and lower others... so that you perceived the room as you otherwise might not have." - Robert Irwin

I think of my work as a dialogue with a place; just a brief conversation with a space or a landscape.   My installations are all site-specific and most of them invite physical interaction from the viewer.   Much of my work is inspired by or created in water, whether it is informed by the way water might fill a given space or uses water as a backdrop for thousands of floating plastic balls or traffic cones.   All of my installations are titled after the location in which they exist, because I see them as a way of temporarily altering a specific space or landscape by adding a foreign element.

In Terrace, people walked into a gallery off a busy Barcelona street, and after walking up 2 flights of stairs, found themselves on an outdoor terrace filled with plastic balls up to their thighs.   The balls acted like water or snow. They formed drifts and were manipulated by the wind.   I'm interested in creating situations like this; where these artificial objects are governed by natural forces.   When I was installing Terrace, I became interested in the way that the balls flooded the rooftop, dividing the space.   This piece was the segue into my more recent installations that use string and spandex to divide spaces.

The divided space installations began as an investigation of the volume of domestic spaces in the city. I thought about what my apartment would look like if it was flooded, and I was left with only half of the space that I had begun with.   I was drawn to the idea of people having to sacrifice their physical comfort for the architecture of a space.   I have begun to use string to divide spaces into cubic yards, a measurement that is directly related to how humans measure space.   These pieces have evolved into a way for me to talk about the relationship of vacant space to real estate value in the city.   Just as the plastic balls are building blocks for the "ball structures" I floated in both the Hudson and the East rivers, I have used the cubic yard as a unit to demonstrate the amount of wasted, overlooked or inaccessible space in the city.   I hope the divided spaces will lead us to question the ways we divide, designate and experience space, and the structures we create to contain it.

My recent collages and videos continue the themes of wastefulness and artificiality by imagining the fate of massive quantities of manufactured goods - sneakers, televisions, traffic cones - that are lost in cargo spills while crossing the Pacific Ocean.

 

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Featured Fellow: NYFA Quarterly


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