Calendar Houses, 2021, Laurel Parker Gallery

Calendar House 2021, Found Magazine Files, Calendar

Calendar House, Laurel Parker Gallery, 2021

Calendar House 2021, Found magazine files, Found Calendar

Calendar House, Found calendar and found magazine files

Installation View Laurel Parker Gallery

Though consistent with Sara MacKillop’s long standing practice of repurposing stationery as as an art material, her new sculptures speak to and about the specific time of their creation. Crafted in 2020, during the Covid lock down, they employ a selection of cardboard file holders and wall calendars to fashion a series of semi-architectural models, each suggesting a different sketch for a detached or semi-detached holiday home. When grouped together, the sculptures appear as ingenious prototypes for the various options available for new homes in a luxury mountain resort as yet to be built. Created within the confines of MacKillop’s flat, simply paring things easily available at her local stationery, and flat packable for shipping, the sculptures suggest an easy-going, playful approach to making art. The artist’s long standing interest in the visual languages through which firms creating office supplies endeavour to lure their customers toward a particular item, such as a pink cardboard file holder, or a wall calendar adorned with images of wild horses, is harnessed to create an architecture of play and leisure.

But exactly through their playfulness, these faux-architectural sculptures offer a reflection on a fundamental contradiction of our present times: the demand for our daily work-space and our free time play-space to be absolutely separate and yet perfectly folded into each other. The skiing retreat to which they refer, is one, if not the,
contemporary play-spaces. It promises, luxury, cozy seclusion, healthy air, outdoor freedom, and pristine cleanliness. It stands for a life and a time that are fundamentally different form the ones of our work life. Yet as MacKillop’s work wirily suggests play-space and work-space are not so easily separated. These small buildings are made of the materials of daily work, their play-space is that described on the office calendars that regulate the workers’s life, their tiled walls ignore the slant of the roof allowing the aesthetic indifference that produced the appropriated folder to shine through, their lapidary solidity is ersatz, their scanning codes are visible.

Gregorio Magnani

Calendar Houses 2021, as part of Barbecue 2 at Office Baroque

Calendar House 2021, Found Magazine Files, Found Calendar

 

Self- Build 2022, Found Magazine Files, Found Calendar Framed

As part of 42 x 60