Heather McGill Oblique Angle For the past decade I have lived and worked in the suburban outskirts of Detroit, a city that exists as a monument to the successes and failures of twentieth-century production. The city’s industrial heritage-the resonant spirit of Fordist innovation and technological promise, continues to inform my sculpture. In Detroit, I was easily seduced by the glittering intrigue of auto detailing and the fetishization of fine tuned form. I learned to paint as an apprentice in a collision shop in the heart of the city; these skills have evolved into a series of sculpture that applies the media of industry to the mantras of modernity. This particular series of work derives its shape from the schemata of a toy model with a 1:72 scale ratio of an actual American space station. Each sculptural element represents a different view of the model as the object rotates in space-a perspective only possible through the flattened, abstract renderings of diagrams and blueprints. This series expands the scale of a miniaturized plaything, reimbuing the sculpture with the monumental sensibility that was lost in the translation between space station and toy. The visual language borrows from both art and industry, bringing together tropes from minimalist sculpture and pop-modern design. The luminous, highly ornamental surface renders the same seduction that attracts young boys to toy jets and grown men to custom hotrods. The sculptures share the systematic use of pattern, specifically hounds tooth, plaid and wood grain. The spectrum of patterning is abstracted to the point of pure self-referentiality. For example the faux-wood grain pattern references the simulacrum of wood, aligning closer to products such as Formica, rather than actual wood. It belongs to the world of appearances, an imitation of the imitated, and a further removal from the organic. The plaid is used as a device to anchor or allow a mapping of the fractured physical surface, not to signify heritage or lineage. Specific sections on the pieces are sprayed with interference paints, which were developed in the 1960s for their ability to create color-shifting illusions triggered by movement and light. The aligning of ones body in a fixed position renders nothing more than a monochrome surface. These paints are activated by the oblique angle, of viewer to object, suggesting a shifting of our perceptual reality. We experience the oblique angle engaged anew as viewers are positioned as participants in the work, activating the semiological system that abstracts and reimagines the texture of fetish and the production of desire. - from heathermcgill.com |
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Published on Aug 7, 2013
Some of the world's most significant findings and greatest artistic achievements emerged from simple curiosity and unbridled creativity. There is an artist and a scientist within all of us. Explore the sweet spot at the intersection of creativity and science with Banff Centre president Jeff Melanson and some of the world's brightest researchers—Ivar Ekeland, Former Director of the Pacific Institute for mathematical Sciences and one of the partners behind BIRS (The Banff International Research Station), and Dr. J. Richard Bond, Director of CIFAR's (Canadian Institute for Applied Research) Cosmology and Gravity Program. Learn how The Banff Centre's multidisciplinary campus creates the ideal conditions for the highest level of problem solving to occur and how our new strategic direction will help deliver these learnings to the world. About Ian Brown - Banff Centre Globe Canada Correspondent Ian Brown is an author and feature writer for The Globe and Mail, and his work has won many National Magazine and National Newspaper awards. He was the host of CBC Radio's Talking Books, and is the anchor of TVOntario's two documentary series, Human Edge and The View from Here. His newest book is The Boy in the Moon. Previous books include Freewheeling, which won the National Business Book Award, and Man Overboard. Based in Toronto, for the past six months he has been living and writing in Banff as the Banff Centre Globe Canada Correspondent. Ian is also the Roger's Chair of The Banff Centre's Literary Journalism program. About Dr. J. Richard Bond - Director of CIFAR's Cosmology and Gravity Program Dick Bond grew up in the Toronto area and received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from The University of Toronto in 1973 before going on to further study and an illustrious teaching career. Dr. Bond has played a leading role in the Canadian cosmology community over the past two decades. His research contributions have been recognized on numerous occasions and he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including being named an Officer of the Order of Canada. About Ivar Ekeland - Former Director of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences — one of the partners behind the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) Ivar Ekeland held the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Economics at UBC from 2003 to 2011, and now lives in Paris. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former President of the University of Paris-Dauphine, and a former Director of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Vancouver. He has written over 150 papers and 10 books on mathematics, economics, and finance, and several books accessible to a wider audience, including The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Cat in Numberland. His current research agenda is focused on sustainable development. About BIRS The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS), located on the Banff Centre campus, is a joint Canada-US-Mexico initiative that seeks to bring together people from a wide range of mathematical, scientific and industry backgrounds and to create a forum for the exchange of knowledge and methods between these specialists. About CIFAR The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research was founded on the belief that Canada has an important role in finding new ways to create a better future for the world. Today, nearly 400 researchers in 16 countries participate in CIFAR's long-term, multidisciplinary, global research networks. CIFAR brings together these unique individuals to focus on important questions with the potential to improve human health and the environment, transform technology, build strong societies, understand human culture, and even chart the universe. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf-glAeJQLI&list=UUFJFUjH4EwdmH7OVfzcy22g&index=122 Benjamin, Walter (1892 - 1940)
German Marxist literary critic. Born into a prosperous Jewish family, Benjamin studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich, and Bern. He settled in Berlin in 1920 and worked thereafter as a literary critic and translator. His half-hearted pursuit of an academic career was cut short when the University of Frankfurt rejected his brilliant but unconventional doctoral thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Benjamin eventually settled in Paris after leaving Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power. He continued to write essays and reviews for literary journals, but when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940 he fled south with the hope of escaping to the US via Spain. Informed by the chief of police at the Franco-Spanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin committed suicide. The posthumous publication of Benjamin’s prolific output won him a growing reputation in the later 20th century. The essays containing his philosophical reflections on literature are written in a dense and concentrated style that contains a strong poetic strain. He mixes social criticism and linguistic analysis with historical nostalgia while communicating an underlying sense of pathos and pessimism. The metaphysical quality of his early critical thought gave way to a Marxist inclination in the 1930s. Benjamin’s pronounced intellectual independence and originality are evident in the extended essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the essays collected in Illuminations. The approach to art of the USSR under Stalin was typified, first, by the persecution of all those who expressed any independent thought, and, second, by the adoption of Socialist Realism - the view that art is dedicated to the "realistic" representation of - simplistic, optimistic - "proletarian values" and proletarian life. Subsequent Marxist thinking about art has been largely influenced by Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács however. Both were exponents of Marxist humanism who saw the important contribution of Marxist theory to aesthetics in the analysis of the condition of labour and in the critique of the alienated and "reified" consciousness of man under capitalism. Benjamin’s collection of essays The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) attempts to describe the changed experience of art in the modern world and sees the rise of Fascism and mass society as the culmination of a process of debasement, whereby art ceases to be a means of instruction and becomes instead a mere gratification, a matter of taste alone. "Communism responds by politicising art" - that is, by making art into the instrument by which the false consciousness of the mass man is to be overthrown. - http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/e.htm#benjamin-walter |