Michael Jones McKean (b. 1976, Truk Island, Micronesia) lives and works in Richmond, VA. He received a MFA from Alfred University, Alfred, NY and a BFA from Marywood University, Scranton, PA. A recipient of numerous awards, the artist has been granted fellowships and residencies at The Core Program / Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Central Michigan University / Stephen L. Barstow Fellowship, Mount Pleasant, MI; The Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, New York, NY; and four State Arts Commission Grants; among others. He has recently been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, New York, NY; Nancy Graves Foundation Award, New York, NY; an Artadia Artist’s Award and an International Studio & Curatorial Program Residency Fellowship. The artist is represented by Horton Gallery, where he has been featured in three solo exhibitions, two group exhibitions, and a solo presentation at the NADA Art Fair, Miami.
Functioning as a central location – where things are collected, moved, and absorbed – Michael Jones McKean’s work explores states of in-between-ness; the spaces between experience and perception, understanding and meaning, fantasy and reality, success and failure. Similarly, through his specific and eclectic ordering of materials and techniques, the artist’s work roams in the margins of theater, folklore, science, architecture, mysticism and sculpture itself. For McKean, the gaps between these coordinates become poetically charged spaces, harnessing an unseen valence momentarily bonding disparate objects in crystalline unison. The results of this process create a bridge allowing entrance to a world flickering between meaning, complexity, representation, and materiality. McKean’s manipulation of such pedestrian yet fantastic organic processes as rainbows also demonstrates our innate desire to physically seize and understand the natural world.
Notable Exhibitions:
Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms, Bemis Center For Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE
Streams of Consciousness: The Histories, Mythologies, and Ecologies of Water, Salina Art Center, Salina, KS
landscape in a room with twenty seven windows, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Tel Aviv, Israel
Manif d’art 5: Biennale de Quebec, Manifestation Internationale d’art de Quebec, Quebec City
brown gold braid and field and plant life,Threewalls, Chicago, IL
Solo Presentation, New Art Dealers Alliance Fair, Miami, FL (with Horton Gallery)
The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows,DiverseWorks, Houston, TX
Riverboat Lovesongs for Ghost Whale Regatta, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO
Learning By Doing, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX
Leg, Lawndale Center for the Arts, Houston, TX
Yankee Clay: Ceramic Artists of the Northeast, The Slater Museum, Norwich, CT
Press Mentions:
"Few natural phenomena inspire the kind of joy and wonder prompted by the fleeting beauty of rainbows. Surely you saw the weepy, stoner-transcendental “double rainbow” video that became a YouTube sensation. Well, this summer artist Michael Jones McKean is hoping to produce a similar effect with his piece at the Bemis Center, which uses captured rainwater to produce a rainbow that arcs directly over the museum for 20 minutes, twice a day (specific times are posted on the museum’s website). The rainwater is pumped to nozzles affixed to the roof. At showtime, certain nozzles activate, producing a wall of water from which the rainbow emerges—each one a unique creation with variations based on the time of day and the position of the sun." - Rachel Wolff, "Must-See Outdoor Art," Architectural Digest, July 2012.
"When people experience the rainbow for the first time," McGraw said, "there is an immediate sense of wonder and amazement that this is possible, and that amazement deepens as you start to consider the complexities required to realize the project." The fleeting nature of rainbows fascinates McKean, a former Bemis resident artist who now is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified,” he says in his project statement, “an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghostlike and meaningful." - Sarah Baker Hansen, "A lot of work goes in to creating Bemis' rainbow," Omaha World-Herald, June 23, 2012.
“Like a poem rendered in three dimensions, McKean’s sculpture affects us through the things it collects (bits of history, popular culture, arcane knowledge, artifacts) and the accumulation of meaning outside its own breadth, it lives between consonants (e.g. lines, textures, edges) and dissonance (the friction of objects, the rawness of being) in the irreconcilable space between the thing (say, an expedition to an unknown land) and the representation of the thing (a handmade replica of the helmet worn by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, for example.) Here, the distances between things (whether problems of representation, geography, or psychic disconnect) are always considered, if not resolved—they are like breaths between words, a wind on the skin; listen closely, McKean seems to say, and you will hear the hum of the Earth turning; be still, and you will feel it on your face.” - Stacy Switzer, “The Object in the Limit: Thoughts on Michael Jones McKean’s Recent Work,” Michael Jones McKean: Selected Projects 2003-2008, Grand Arts, March 2008.
“McKean’s montage sculptures achieve a level of accomplishment in space activation and exhibition design I have yet to see matched at any art fair, including Basel. What’s more, the work itself is amongst the best I’ve seen, the negative and positive space creating complexity and surface to the work. The arrangements themselves would seem almost too perfectly placed, were it not for the use rich textiles, which demand deliberation of that sort.” - Paddy Johnson, artfagcity.com, December 2007.
If the New Museum's coming inaugural show, ''Unmonumental,'' is any indication, young artists are turning to assemblage to express fragility and fragmentation. Michael Jones McKean is not one of them. The amalgamations of found and handmade objects on shelves in his New York debut have a robust, formal poetry…”– Karen Rosenburg, The New York Times, September 2007.
“But it's ultimately his aesthetic, combined with a humanism which enables each of his projects to serve as something like an avatar of our relationship to the hopes, dreams and failures of our freaky civilization and the wonderful and mad heroes it regularly churns out, that makes this art so honest, so brilliant, and so unforgettable.” - James Wagner, jameswagner.com, September, 2007.
“Much as the notion of a contemporary explorer is futile, McKean very consciously sabotages his project by celebrating the moments that can’t be resolved. He makes his point when the balance of form and content falls down, when meaning can no loner be divorced from material, when strained and random relationships between the part and the whole upstage the possible emergence of a succinct story. From here, he can ask what it means to want to struggle for something so impossible now.” – Michelle White, Art Papers, July/August 2007.
Unusual in approach and complex in execution, The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows gives rise to as many questions as answers. Yet, at the root of the installation lies a mysterious and ethereal beauty. By manipulating scale, composition, time, history, and memory, McKean has created an elusive, disjointed new reality that frees us from the constraints of the natural order. “ – Diane Barber, Catalogue essay for “The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows,” Diverse Works, Spring 2007.
“Where other accumulation artists rely on improvisational flair, McKean calculates. Despite its imagery of collision and chaos, the piece is stiff and studied like a shop window display. The carefully disjointed style of composition is familiar from recent painting- it embeds romantic narrative detail in a matrix of modernist formalism. The Possibility of Men plunks nuggets of history into a sea of tidy carpentry and cubist color.” – Bill Davenport, Glasstire: Texas Visual Arts Online, February 2007.
“McKean loves to arrange things, forcing viewers to contemplate the objects' apparent relationships to one another. The period clothes, the mysterious clay figure leaning on its side nearby, an oversized paddleboat steering wheel, a gilded banjo, a jug, a trumpet, a harpoon, some coins, a few face masks — they're all composed to convey a story that we must piece together ourselves.” – Ray T. Barker, Pitch, September 2006.
Notable Collections:
Centro per l'Arte Contempranea Luigi Pecci, Prato, IT
Functioning as a central location – where things are collected, moved, and absorbed – Michael Jones McKean’s work explores states of in-between-ness; the spaces between experience and perception, understanding and meaning, fantasy and reality, success and failure. Similarly, through his specific and eclectic ordering of materials and techniques, the artist’s work roams in the margins of theater, folklore, science, architecture, mysticism and sculpture itself. For McKean, the gaps between these coordinates become poetically charged spaces, harnessing an unseen valence momentarily bonding disparate objects in crystalline unison. The results of this process create a bridge allowing entrance to a world flickering between meaning, complexity, representation, and materiality. McKean’s manipulation of such pedestrian yet fantastic organic processes as rainbows also demonstrates our innate desire to physically seize and understand the natural world.
Notable Exhibitions:
Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms, Bemis Center For Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE
Streams of Consciousness: The Histories, Mythologies, and Ecologies of Water, Salina Art Center, Salina, KS
landscape in a room with twenty seven windows, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Tel Aviv, Israel
Manif d’art 5: Biennale de Quebec, Manifestation Internationale d’art de Quebec, Quebec City
brown gold braid and field and plant life,Threewalls, Chicago, IL
Solo Presentation, New Art Dealers Alliance Fair, Miami, FL (with Horton Gallery)
The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows,DiverseWorks, Houston, TX
Riverboat Lovesongs for Ghost Whale Regatta, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO
Learning By Doing, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX
Leg, Lawndale Center for the Arts, Houston, TX
Yankee Clay: Ceramic Artists of the Northeast, The Slater Museum, Norwich, CT
Press Mentions:
"Few natural phenomena inspire the kind of joy and wonder prompted by the fleeting beauty of rainbows. Surely you saw the weepy, stoner-transcendental “double rainbow” video that became a YouTube sensation. Well, this summer artist Michael Jones McKean is hoping to produce a similar effect with his piece at the Bemis Center, which uses captured rainwater to produce a rainbow that arcs directly over the museum for 20 minutes, twice a day (specific times are posted on the museum’s website). The rainwater is pumped to nozzles affixed to the roof. At showtime, certain nozzles activate, producing a wall of water from which the rainbow emerges—each one a unique creation with variations based on the time of day and the position of the sun." - Rachel Wolff, "Must-See Outdoor Art," Architectural Digest, July 2012.
"When people experience the rainbow for the first time," McGraw said, "there is an immediate sense of wonder and amazement that this is possible, and that amazement deepens as you start to consider the complexities required to realize the project." The fleeting nature of rainbows fascinates McKean, a former Bemis resident artist who now is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified,” he says in his project statement, “an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghostlike and meaningful." - Sarah Baker Hansen, "A lot of work goes in to creating Bemis' rainbow," Omaha World-Herald, June 23, 2012.
“Like a poem rendered in three dimensions, McKean’s sculpture affects us through the things it collects (bits of history, popular culture, arcane knowledge, artifacts) and the accumulation of meaning outside its own breadth, it lives between consonants (e.g. lines, textures, edges) and dissonance (the friction of objects, the rawness of being) in the irreconcilable space between the thing (say, an expedition to an unknown land) and the representation of the thing (a handmade replica of the helmet worn by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, for example.) Here, the distances between things (whether problems of representation, geography, or psychic disconnect) are always considered, if not resolved—they are like breaths between words, a wind on the skin; listen closely, McKean seems to say, and you will hear the hum of the Earth turning; be still, and you will feel it on your face.” - Stacy Switzer, “The Object in the Limit: Thoughts on Michael Jones McKean’s Recent Work,” Michael Jones McKean: Selected Projects 2003-2008, Grand Arts, March 2008.
“McKean’s montage sculptures achieve a level of accomplishment in space activation and exhibition design I have yet to see matched at any art fair, including Basel. What’s more, the work itself is amongst the best I’ve seen, the negative and positive space creating complexity and surface to the work. The arrangements themselves would seem almost too perfectly placed, were it not for the use rich textiles, which demand deliberation of that sort.” - Paddy Johnson, artfagcity.com, December 2007.
If the New Museum's coming inaugural show, ''Unmonumental,'' is any indication, young artists are turning to assemblage to express fragility and fragmentation. Michael Jones McKean is not one of them. The amalgamations of found and handmade objects on shelves in his New York debut have a robust, formal poetry…”– Karen Rosenburg, The New York Times, September 2007.
“But it's ultimately his aesthetic, combined with a humanism which enables each of his projects to serve as something like an avatar of our relationship to the hopes, dreams and failures of our freaky civilization and the wonderful and mad heroes it regularly churns out, that makes this art so honest, so brilliant, and so unforgettable.” - James Wagner, jameswagner.com, September, 2007.
“Much as the notion of a contemporary explorer is futile, McKean very consciously sabotages his project by celebrating the moments that can’t be resolved. He makes his point when the balance of form and content falls down, when meaning can no loner be divorced from material, when strained and random relationships between the part and the whole upstage the possible emergence of a succinct story. From here, he can ask what it means to want to struggle for something so impossible now.” – Michelle White, Art Papers, July/August 2007.
Unusual in approach and complex in execution, The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows gives rise to as many questions as answers. Yet, at the root of the installation lies a mysterious and ethereal beauty. By manipulating scale, composition, time, history, and memory, McKean has created an elusive, disjointed new reality that frees us from the constraints of the natural order. “ – Diane Barber, Catalogue essay for “The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows,” Diverse Works, Spring 2007.
“Where other accumulation artists rely on improvisational flair, McKean calculates. Despite its imagery of collision and chaos, the piece is stiff and studied like a shop window display. The carefully disjointed style of composition is familiar from recent painting- it embeds romantic narrative detail in a matrix of modernist formalism. The Possibility of Men plunks nuggets of history into a sea of tidy carpentry and cubist color.” – Bill Davenport, Glasstire: Texas Visual Arts Online, February 2007.
“McKean loves to arrange things, forcing viewers to contemplate the objects' apparent relationships to one another. The period clothes, the mysterious clay figure leaning on its side nearby, an oversized paddleboat steering wheel, a gilded banjo, a jug, a trumpet, a harpoon, some coins, a few face masks — they're all composed to convey a story that we must piece together ourselves.” – Ray T. Barker, Pitch, September 2006.
Notable Collections:
Centro per l'Arte Contempranea Luigi Pecci, Prato, IT
Photo: Courtesy of the artist