White Columns, New York,Installation view, 2011

l-r file, stacked envelope, fax books on table, string

 

 

Pens, pen casing, pink string, 2011

For her White Room exhibition MacKillop will present a discrete group of recent sculptural works that utilize and subtly disrupt commonplace, everyday objects.

Writing about MacKillop’s practice the British curator Andrew Hunt has observed:

“Fundamentally, MacKillop’s re-coding of objects as unfamiliar and strange has the effect of drops in a pond that reverberate beyond their initial impact. Her radically small interventions scramble the logic of everyday ephemera, and act as micro events that affect and complicate perception in a refined and unexpected fashion.”

Taking the legacies of both minimalism and conceptualism as her departure points MacKillop invests a quiet precision in her often disarmingly modest and deceptively informal gestures. Using found materials that typically have some relationship to the hand (e.g. pens, suspension files, balls of string, etc.) MacKillop applies her own particular logic to re-purposing these objects as art. Staged together in a kind of mise-en-scene or quasi-theatrical tableau, there is a dead-pan - or even tragic-comic - humor at play in these gestures. Attracted to increasingly anachronistic objects, MacKillop’s work evinces a form of melancholia, if not exactly nostalgia, for an entire category of once useful products (e.g. the fax machine paper rolls, she folds concertina-style into artist’s books.) Mackillop’s process might perhaps be thought of as a kind of informal formalism, her goal a gentle subversion of norms, the result of which is to create works that – despite their barely-there-ness – maintain an uncanny presence.