Statement
My works create space saturated with history, relationships, and experience. Stained canvas draped and stretched on scrap steel evokes endurance and the weight of time. I work steel roughly, leaving on it the violence of making. Pipe and plate are welded, cut, and welded again, leaving scars and stains on the metal. Many pipes have loops welded to them and can be join with chain-mending links. These loop-link joints are loose, forcing an organic approach to construction—adding and subtracting elements to find the structure’s strength and balance.
My canvas comes from Asia, its untouched newness belying its complex past. In its weave is tangled a history of privilege, servitude, oppression. Fleeting, involuntary intimacy haunts it, the unseen mark of hands harvesting, looming, sewing, packing, hauling. Receiving this canvas I take my turn, investing myself in it, staining it with hand-gathered dyestuffs. As with steel, the canvas is cut and torn to fit each installation, then mended and recombined with wire stitches, rope, knots and other methods. The same canvas and steel are used over and over.
Richard Long, Alicja Kwade, Mike Nelson are among the artists who influence my thinking about manipulating space. Canvas installations by Sam Gilliam and Dala Nasser are large in my mind, and I’m revisiting the Magdalena Abakanowicz’s massive woven and knotted Abakans.
Bio
For James McKenna the world is a tangible manifestation of the intangible. As an undergraduate in metalsmithing, he crafted damaged objects invoking the ritual life of a long-past imaginary culture. Later work with steel was built around a world of forces and archetypes behind the material world.
Engaging more deeply with a variety of materials, he infused sweat and occasionally blood as he traced his body on paper, canvas, and drywall. Physical remainders of his absent body added time as another dimension of his practice. Soon time and relationships replaced the self as primary themes. Installations of scrap steel and ragged, stained canvas recognize layers of human presence preceding his own, past purposes, feelings, and memories.
A recent graduate of DAAP in Cincinnati, James teaches at Northern Kentucky University. He has shown in galleries around the country, and recently at the Contemporary Arts Center, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, and PAR Projects, a community-based fine arts organization.
Contact
James McKenna
513-315-9265
james@jamesmckenna.us
jamesmckennastudio.com
Instagram: jamesmckennastudio
