"Influences are everywhere"Artist Kim McLean takes a few moments to discuss his upcoming show, opening August 19 at Carrie Haddad Photographs. The interview below was conducted via email on August 15 & 16:
Q: What were your first experiences making art?
A: They were pretty awful. But I made some interesting gadgets. I made a double- doored bird trap out of rubber bands and an Erector Set that made a flashlight bulb blink in my room when the bait was taken. One day the bulb started blinking and the rest was chaos getting the bird out. It flew away. That was it for the trap.
Q: How did you get to where you are now, using complex 3-D technologies to make these virtual worlds?
A: One step at a time. The learning curve for FormZ is pretty steep. It seemed like it took forever to get to the point that I could start thinking with the application. I was attracted to the manuals, they’re just plain mysterious. The application is a big puzzle and making things with it involves constant problem solving. One of the biggest hurdles to making credible models is avoiding a contrived cheap video game look. Usually you have to contrive a gimmick to make the image plausible whether it’s by mood-lighting or deformation or some other tool. The models don’t always come alive. Sometimes the tools necessary to fix a bad model either don’t exist, can’t be found or can’t be figured out at which point you have to cheat. If you keep pulling on it, it usually works out.
Q: Can you briefly describe your process? Can you talk about the evolution of your work from original idea to final image?
A: The larger pieces can take 4-6 months to make and during that time a lot happens. Ideas drift in and drift out, some make it some don’t . Some I can’t figure out how to draw. I wanted to use Nick Goldsmith’s Detroit Bus Station in Fokker Night Blue and had to shift the focus of the piece when I realized that drawing it was beyond my reach, for the time at least. So I started looking for a stand in and somehow found Shukhov’s Tower in a web search for brilliant ideas. Actually I was looking at Tatlin’s Tower but some how ended up thinking it was overused. It took a while to get inside the logic of a hyperboloid enough to draw the tower. There’s a lot of experimenting, some of it works, some of it doesn’t. One that did work is the view from an underneath perspective of Shukov’s Tower in Plane O’Clock. There’s a tendency to cram the pictures with lots of models and quite a bit of time is spent taking stuff out of the pictures. Gesture isn’t really part of the vocabulary but there is the occasional happy accident. Making the parts is well, pretty mathematical and deliberate. I haven’t figured out too many shortcuts. There’s a methodology for everything.
Q: Your images are packed with historical and artistic references. What are your influences? Do they come from music, literature, painting, daily life? How do you choose your subject matter?
A: This is the best part. Influences are everywhere. I watch TV while I work most of the time and one night caught The Manchurian Candidate. The 1962 film donated the Queen of Hearts idea for the house of cards motif. I ripped off Louise Bourgeois’ beautiful spider for the antagonist and the battleship South Dakota for the protagonist in Coffee?. Andre Kertesz’s photograph of the train on the viaduct Meudon was the starting point for Politics and Martinis in much the same way Bernice Abbot’s Downtown Skyport was for Fokker Night Blue. Erector Sets played a major role in my life as a kid and end up as a great building device in a couple of pieces. I got a kick out of building a tidal wave (Hokusai) out of hundreds of Erector set girders. Of course, architectural references play important roles; see the Russian Constructivist Palace of Labor from Ume Enters the City and Shukhov’s Tower in Coast Daylight.
The imagery usually tends toward the iconic although there are twists involved. I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and saw a totem pole about 5 feet tall made in Papua, New Guinea. The figures, one above the other were sitting on the head of the figure below. I was thinking, boy that must be uncomfortable so when I made the totem pole in Fokker Night Blue, I was trying to get at that notion. One guy near the bottom has a really squeezed head. That’s funny. I had to find THE train, not “a” train, to go over the bridge in Ume Enters the City (pronounced you-me). The search reminded me of Jasper Johns talking about looking for THE iconic model for THE flashlight in the 1960 sculpture oddly enough called Flashlight. I found THE iconic train in one called Coast Daylight, and what a poetic name. Violet and Glowing and Nickel Tour Red owe generally to Sci-Fi. The clock image is an accurate lift from a Flash Gordon episode called, you guessed it, Deadline at Noon. By 3 minutes after noon, the deadline passed, it was clear that Flash had saved the day. That specific time occurs in CHF_Hubble and Plane O’clock O’clock. I changed the time in Veronica Lake to 2:21 so the clock hands could operate compositionally.
Q: The technology of graphic imagery is advancing rapidly. How do these advances affect what you do in your artwork?
A: I have no idea. I’m amazed the stuff works to begin with. I have the idea I’ll eventually make little stero-lithographic sculptures, but I’m waiting for a graceful way in. I’ll eventually find someone who can clue me in.
Q: Do you have a specific message or feeling in mind in each image that you want to convey to the viewer? If so, is it part of the original idea or does it emerge as you compose the image?
A: Not really, not in this show any way. I tried to make a piece about bringing our son Geddy back from the Ethiopian orphanage. The one identifiable vestige of the idea turns out as the billboard of Haile Selasse on the walls of the stepped structure in Ume Enters the City. The piece that I can genuinely say is about something is Politics and Martinis. It references a travel poster and is about my mother’s death, she loved to travel. The picture is part of an unfinished series modeled after the Thomas Cole series Voyage of Man Through Life. The Queen Mary approaches the shore, as in “her ships coming in”; a positive omen. The steamshovel (Bucyrus Erie’s “Baby Brutus”) is digging a grave. The Arch of Triumph (as in Paris) is a machine/elevator whose counter weight weighs “0”. At the top of the arch the guitarist plays a Flying V guitar (somewhat, somehow appropriate). The guitarist character is a very personal invention and appears as a minotaur’s reference to Picasso’s bicycle seat and handle bars. His name is Umethaeus (you-me-they-us) and he’s appeared in a couple of pictures as the existential man. The music he’s playing is written as a speech bubble and is excerpted from Lead Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.
Thank you to Kim for answering our questions! If you would like more information on the exhibit, or to see the rest of the works referenced in this interview, please visit the website, or contact us using the information below.
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