Kim McLean

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2011 to 2012

2010 and Earlier

Artist Bio

Kim McLean’s images capture virtual worlds in which monuments redolent of hardship and triumph mingle with artifacts and sculptures of artists past. In one work a battleship is placed amidst a tempestuous sea of illegibly tiny text; in another the Russian Constructivist Palace of Labor inhabits an environment made up of intricate lattices and Ferris wheels. Employing an architectural software program, McLean designs these figures such that they can be turned in space as solid objects. In a process McLean terms “mapping,” the artist covers these icons of culture and history with surfaces that provide a stark contrast to the forms beneath—for instance, pages from a Greene County phone book shroud McLean’s models of a USN battleship and a looming Louise Bourgeois sculpture . This visual richness through layering mirrors a conceptual superimposition: in these works, the banality of the small-town phone book page is set against—and in conjunction with—paragons of grandeur. Furthermore, as the flat page wraps around sculptural form, surface and depth are cast in tension, lending these virtual worlds the appearance of a physical reality. Sometimes, the text of the page is obscured through scale and depth, and the meaning the words hold is elided by the authority of form—both its sheer physicality and its conceptual potency. Depth is confusing; the nature of these virtual spaces—the spatial relationships between objects—is in places indiscernible. The effect of this spatial ambiguity is a lack of resolution: the physical reality of these constructions never fully materializes. Rather, McLean suspends these forms in virtuality, sustaining their power to confuse and evoke.   
 

Click here to read an online interview with KIM McLEAN

 


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