Kate McKinney, a Los Angeles artist, is currently showing at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. Her installation in the exhibit “Fresh Voices of Jewish Art,” presents the viewer with a spiritual tableau aptly titled “The Amazing Experience.” The elements of her piece, which have been assembled with loose spontaneity, are suggestive of itinerant theatre or a child’s urgent drawing that witness a profound event. The entire installation is hung overhead and viewed from below, from an earth-bound perspective.
Viewers are deeply moved by the images conveyed by the books. Ms. McKinney, who is Jewish, recently married a Muslim man and this work is not only a statement on the merging of their two cultures, but the possibility of co-existence between all cultures.
The centerpiece of this artistic tableau shows two white floating burkas flanking two Stars of David with a flag in its center, attended below by spirits in the form of mutilated books. The two Stars of David are made of dark slats of wood describing the outline; a larger one is behind its smaller twin implying depth or passage. Hanging within the center of these stars, like a sacred object in a reliquary, is a small relief, suspended in a picture frame, of a wind blown American flag. Beneath are five opened books with cut and slashed pages that burst from their old spines in an extravagant display of transformation. There are six more of these altered books hanging from a companion piece nearby. Seen from below the art resembles a surrealistic seascape of origami jellyfish. But mostly they function as intense objects of psychological investment. The artist has carefully mutilated the pages of each book with a sharp knife creating a froth of doily-like forms and startling shredding. Precision and chaos co-exist in these sacrificed books. Through them, Ms. McKinney has mediated suffering and beauty, destruction and creation. They act as poetic objects but are also testimony to a frenetic and obsessive process. It seems that a driven and intense compulsion, such as the cutting of paper dolls over and over again for instance, has been rallied into objects of homage. The process used to make them speaks loudly through them and gives them compelling vitality. Some might mourn or disparage the destruction of books in principle. However, the jagged and sharp edges shooting out of those old faded covers invite a million paper cuts, a book’s perfect revenge.
Author A.J. Llewellyn who visited the exhibit and blogged about his experience declared that Ms. McKinney is not just a fresh new voice in Jewish art, but the movement’s high priestess: www.tinyurl.com/ye63ufb
Her exhibit is open to the public until December 31, 2009.
Limited editions giclee prints of a variety of Kate McKinney’s artwork are available at The Art Gallows website at www.theartgallows.com.
The Art Gallows is an online gallery featuring limited edition art and photography. Our vision is to provide an empowering marketplace for emerging and established artists which leverages the power of the internet to bring the traditional art gallery to the widest possible audience.
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Image: Detail from “The Amazing Experience” by Los Angeles artist Kate McKinney
