Photographer: Heike Dempster
Michael Jones McKean - The Comedy
In “we float above to spit and sing” at Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Michael Jones McKean presents his poetic interpretations of materialism and technology, explorations of the ontology of objects and his meditations on our relationship to those objects.
McKean has a particular interest in objects, materiality and histories with a clear sensitivity to how things are built and shed meanings over time. Recently, he has begun examining humanity’s relationship with technology and the changes from an object-based world to a life with a strong virtual component that alludes to a pre-internet condition.
Curated by Tara Strickstein, the exhibition presents twelve of McKean’s sculptures and installations. The space is reminiscent of an archeological study site or museum, as the pieces, like ancient relics, appear to be in a state of preservation from the past. The objects in the installations are classified, clustered together and presented as if anthropocentrically categorized by archeologists. Through the eye of a historian, McKean exposes unstable relationship between objects and our shared realities and provokes the viewer to question the meanings of objects without a context of human definition, language and structure.
Photographer: Heike Dempster
Michael Jones McKean - detail of The Garden
Photographer: Heike Dempster
Michael jones Mckean - we float above to spit and sing
The artist’s curiosity about a “third thing” existing in between objects defined by humanity and a world free of human associations provides the basis for the works in the exhibit. In a 2013 interview with Clayton Sean Horton, McKean refers to this “third thing” as “maybe an animistic plane of spirited forms evading us, escaping the gravitational pull of our poems and our metaphors. A place where objects, when they choose to visit us, do so with all their unknowable intelligence and perverse strangeness intact.”
In McKean’s world and work, representations of natural objects and contemporary technology cohabit. The materials of the mixed media works can be roughly placed in five categories: Traditional materials such as paint and wood; non-traditional materials like marine resin, nail polish, tar and hair; natural materials like coral or Himalayan wild flowers; man-made and technological objects like flip flops, external light sources, cell phones and floppy disks, and ancient artifacts and pottery.
The choice of objects featured in the installations provide commentary on human history and the advancements in technology. What may be considered the latest advancement today will be equivalent to our perception of ancient pottery in the near future. An important aspect to McKean’s use of objects is also the hidden. Many of the “ingredients” of his installations and sculptures cannot be perceived by the eye as they are hidden inside, embedded and embalmed inside representations of other objects. The connections may not be obvious or related to the respective object’s initial purpose but McKean builds new connections thereby altering the definitions and values of the objects.
Photographer: Heike Dempster
Michael Jones McKean - magic birth
Photographer: Heike Dempster
Michael Jones McKean - partal view of The Garden
Who made the object? Of what is it made? How does its creation process affect the environment? Which details are relevant to an individual’s decision making process? These details offer valuable insight into the consumer and the respective society, times and belief system, but McKean wants to take his investigations a step further and go beyond the value system implied by these details and investigate a possible value system and multiple meanings of the objects that exists simultaneously outside of what has been created by the human context. Furthermore, he considers how these variables, in constant flux based on factors like technological advancements, affect our understanding of and relationship to art objects, including the sculptures he creates.
McKean’s sculptures embrace a double-reality where objects travel between their lives defined by human association with all its meanings, functions, and poetic narratives and their inward, private, speculative lives as pure material, ambivalent to our desires and needs for them.
“Michael Jones McKean: we float above to spit and sing” is on view through July 31, 2014 at Emerson Dorsch, 151 NW 24th Street, Miami. www.dorschgallery.com.
