Kendall Koppe, Glasgow
The presentation for ART-O-RAMA is to function as a serene space of meditation that upon closer inspection is filled with objects of our modern day consumptions. The works act as modern day relics that are discovered upon close inspection, bathed in natural light in addition to the light of two circular neon bodies. The exhibition introduces a number of key ideas and motifs from Macdonald’s practice, featuring new sculptures in plaster, neon and cast black rubber.
Through the perfect skin of the cast items, the works offer glimpses of an alternative world where objects register in mute aesthetic equivalence. Combined, they set out their logic: playful, classical, formal, sexual; they speak to us as the concrete poems of a knowing and matter-obsessed world and the vocabulary it uses is one of syntax and sentence Lifted wholesale from their previous functions, the items that are selected and given back to the viewers (the bones, phones, cameras, etc , that appear here subjected to varying degrees of transformation) are physical samples of the material world that surrounds us. Divorced from their previous lives, these small objects are rendered seductively anonymous. Rendered uniform in colour and substance, the articles are lovingly fetishised, made sculptural and aesthetic. By doing so the work celebrates a complex visual immediacy, familiarity, and an irresistible ability to give us pleasure in instant recognition.
Bathed in the pink and green glow of two Neon Constellations, the exhibition frames an alternative sculptural reality where objects are exactly as they seem.