Image courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery
Week before last, we invited you to party with us (in absentia), Sarah McKenzie, and Jen Bekman at Ms. Bekman’s Nolita gallery. This week, after a few days spent stalking the delightful Colorado-based painter, we bring you her words. But first, given that every day is Solipsism Day, a few of ours.
McKenzie’s paintings of construction sites are killer, and, if at all possible, should be seen in person. There’s something about their scale and brightness, about the different levels of paint she applies, about the combination of geometric flatness and material texture, that invites a truth out of architecture-in-progress that’s difficult to see in a photograph. Earlier work—like Lift, and Construction 4—is dense and lush. Paint is escaping the canvas, and looking at the saturated pieces makes your teeth feel a little sticky, like you just chewed on some chalk or a Mika Rottenberg cherry. Later work—like Interior and Interior 3—is flatter, the levels of distance between you and objects and objects farther away more compressed. Your eye searches less for something to hang on to with these paintings, and searches more for a way to penetrate an image that’s so unambiguous you just want to figure it out.
And that’s how we came to find Sarah, and ask her a few questions:
Why did you make the shift from aerial suburb paintings to construction sites?
This shift occurred for a few reasons. First, I made the aerial paintings from about 1999 until 2004, and after five years, I felt like that work had run its course, and I’d taken that imagery as far as I needed it to go. I’m still really proud of that work, but it was time to move on. My last “official” aerial painting, in 2004, was titled Aerial #69, so that gives you a fairly good idea of just how many paintings I produced for that series.
Coinciding with my creative desire to move on was the fact that, in 2004, I stopped using a film camera to shoot the aerial photographs from which I was painting, and I started shooting digitally. Most of my photographs were taken from hot air balloon, and although the balloon occasionally got quite low to the ground, most of the time I was floating anywhere from 200 to 1000 feet above my subject matter. When I switched to the digital camera, I was delighted to discover just how easy it was, using Photoshop, to zoom in on my high resolution photos and see tiny details up close. It sounds so simple, but really the shift in technologies was a huge catalyst for change in my work. Many of my later aerial paintings had focused on construction sites, and I was already quite interested in the structure of unfinished houses, but it was the digital camera that really made it possible for me to pursue that as a new body of work.
My first few construction paintings (from 2004-5) still included the aerial perspective, even as I began focusing on individual houses. I like the way the aerial perspective works to disorient the viewer, transforming these otherwise familiar construction sites into almost abstract compositions. Even though I have never been an abstract painter per se, I have always been interested in abstraction. In these images of unfinished architecture, I think I have found an ideal vehicle for exploring elements of abstract painting (grids, stripes, color relativity, flatness vs. depth, etc.) while still keeping one foot firmly in the realm of observation. At present, I am not taking aerial photos— I think I am able to find abstract qualities in the architecture even from ground level, but I can imagine bringing the bird’s-eye view back in at some point. Lately I’ve been taking lots of photos looking up, and that’s a perspective which can also serve to dislocate the viewer, in a good way.
I would describe the new work as being rooted in suburbia and the contemporary American landscape, but it is not about the landscape in a direct sense. For me, the work is much more about the process of building a picture on a two-dimensional surface, and I am using architecture metaphorically.
How do you look at a building-in-progress as opposed to a finished one? What are you seeing that your paintings are showing?
We. Just. Can’t. Keep. Up. With. Our. Contributors. Today. Over to you, Michael!
