Name Michael McKean | ||
Education Marywood University, Alfred University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada | ||
Twice performing objects artist talk with michael jones mckean
Michael Jones McKean (born March 2, 1976) is an American artist. He is known primarily for his large-scale installations and sculptures dealing with issues of narration, complexity, representation, materiality and failure.
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Michael jones mckean the rainbow certain principles of light and shapes between forms
Biography
McKean was born on Chuuk Island (formally Truk Island) in Micronesia. His family moved to the United States in the late 1970s settling in Arden, Delaware. McKean attended Marywood University, a small liberal arts college in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2000. Two years later he received his Master of Fine Arts from Alfred University in Western New York State.
Work
McKean’s work articulates potentials in objects, materials and their arrangement while pointing toward the possibility of larger narrative and anthropological associations. The work skids across time, organizing disparate objects into unifying constellations that appeal to our imaginations and intellects while seeking to re-articulate our ancient involvement with forms, materials, meaning, representation, and poetics.
In an interview with Clayton Sean, McKean is quoted describing his work: “The sculptures embrace a double-reality where materials and objects travel between their lives ‘with us;’ a reality that supports their associative meanings, poetics, functions, references, mythologies, politics, and ordering systems that we construct for them, and their inward, private lives as pure material ‘without us;’ a parallel, more speculative reality where objects float in psychic voids, ambivalent to our desires and needs for them. I’m curious if somewhere in-between this object-oriented shadow world freed from human associations, and the mind-dependent, literate world we create for objects, there might be a fucked-up, but totally generative ‘third thing.’ 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.”
Solo Exhibitions
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
Awards and Recognition
McKean was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. He has also been awarded grants and residencies from the Nancy Graves Foundation, the Artadia Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Archie Bray Foundation and The Core Program at the Glassell School/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Since 2006 McKean has taught in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University | VCU School of the Arts where he is an associate professor.
Interviews
- "An Evolving Turn: A conversation with Timur Si-Qin, Michael Jones McKean and Pablo Larios," DIS, April 2013.
- Q & A with Clayton Sean Horton and Michael Jones McKean
- "Priscilla Frank, "Michael Jones McKean To Build Rainbow Over Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts," Huffington Post, May 2012.
- Eric Zimmerman, Interview: “The Historian and the Astronomer,” might be good, issue #98.
- Matthew Edgeworth, “In Conversation,” interview for the wake the saint the sound the branch, Project Gentili, Prato, Italy.
- Christopher Cook, Dissolving Logic in H2O, Exhibition Interview for The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, 6-13.