Statement
My practice is about the body, especially its capacity for endurance and its mortality. I’m interested in the body’s interior narratives, what we say to ourselves and how we feel about ourselves and our place in the world. My exploration across media has led to installations of steel and canvas, performances in rain and wind, body tracings on varied surfaces, and videos exploring the nature of mortality. Materials have ranged from flowers to lead, from pebbles to rusted fragments of boilerplate.
My current work investigates feelings of invisibility and separation from the world because of age, gender identity, weight, homelessness, and other factors. These are sculptures about what goes on inside, what is hidden, wordless, and separate from the world. These wall sculptures express this interiority through suspension. The charred wood background is suspended from the wall, and the compositions float in front of the wood.
Materials in these artworks are mostly discards of some kind. For the wood I hammer apart industrial pallets; much of the metal is from scrapyards and metal-shop scrap bins. Stones and shells I often find on a riverbank. Found materials carry a sense of endurance and of beauty hidden from the world. Many of my surfaces are just as I found them, rusted, scarred, marked by past lives. This preservation feels honest to me, enables the surface to tell a deeper story, an interior narrative.
Contact
james@jamesmckennastudio.com
CV
Selected Exhibitions
2024 Shelter, performed atop 911 Evans St. in Queensgate, Cincinnati, Ohio
2024 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, installation in Northern Kentucky University faculty show, Highland Heights, Kentucky
2023 Cyclone, installation at PAR-Projects, Cincinnati, Ohio
2023 Directors’ Choice, Group Show, Reed Gallery, Cincinnati Ohio
2023 Remains, installation at Earth Day Group Show, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Hamilton, Ohio
2023 Earthbound, installation in Ready to Bolt, Group Show, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
2023 Rectilinear, Installation, Solo Show, DAAP Annex Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2023 Annual Juried Show, Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia
2023 The Days, Installation, Solo Show, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 First Class Passage, Installation, Solo Show, DAAP Annex Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2023 Winter Juried Show, Blue Mountain Gallery, Chelsea, New York
2022 Real Allegory of My Life as an Artist, performed at Annexibition, DAAP Annex, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 Banners, Solo Show, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 Difficult Body, Solo Show, DAAP Annex Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 I Feel Myself Alive in This Present, Passing Moment, performed at IRiS Ignite Conference of the Institute for Research in Sensing, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 Abstract, Group Show, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, California
2022 Is It Done Yet? Group Show, Gallery 114, Portland, Oregon
2022 Beast, installation at Earth Day Group Show, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Hamilton, Ohio
2022 Residual, Group Show, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2022 129, installation, Solo Show, DAAP Annex Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2021 Group Show, Reed Gallery, Cincinnati Oho
2021 Field Work, Group Show, Meyers Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2021 The Myth & the Thing Itself, Solo Show, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
Awards
2023 DAAPworks Directors’ Choice Award, University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning
2022 Judith Smith Koroscik Graduate Fellowship, University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning
2022 Beverly Helmhold Erschell Endowed Scholarship, University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning
2022 Wolfstein Travel Fellowship (Iceland), University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning
Education
2023 MFA University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning
1992 MA, English, University of Cincinnati
Teaching
2023-24 Northern Kentucky University, School of the Arts, Highland Heights, KY
2021 University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning
2012 University of Cincinnati-Clermont, Batavia, OH
1992-95 University of Cincinnati, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences
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 materials, he began tracing his body with graphite and charcoal on paper, canvas, and drywall. Physical remainders of his absent body added time as another dimension of his practice. Over decades relationships among the body, time, and the sacred—materiality and immateriality—have been important themes. Installations of scrap steel and ragged, stained canvas recognize layers of human presence preceding his own, past purposes, feelings, and memories. His current body of work explores endurance and interiority using charred wood, metal, and various organic materials.
A graduate of DAAP in Cincinnati, James has shown around the US, including installations at the Contemporary Arts Center and Pyramid Sculpture Park.
