Statement
I am preoccupied by the end of the world. Amidst climate precarity, my practice cultivates ecological response-ability through material processes, landscape interventions, and temporal imagination.
Drawing on sculpture, textile, video, and text to stage installations, I treat all media as time-based. My materials are both ephemeral and geologic, including sugar, ice, wax, botanicals, stones, construction discards, obsolete media, and audiovisual elements. As salvage objects, I populate sculptural spaces with still and moving images from art history and pop culture, locating parallels between regimes of representation and actual land and water use. I engage the mechanics of visual culture, querying how images are (re)produced and circulate as commodities.
Through installations, I find a field for science-fictional thinking, where present landscapes inform speculative future ecologies. Encounters with multiple time scales, unexpected materialities, and hybrid writing practices invite participation in more-than-human worlds. In the hybrid zone between a rocky present and unknown futures, I work to evoke cycles of entropy, transformation, and renewal.
Bio
Cecilia McKinnon is an intermedia artist, primarily working in sculpture, installation, and video. She is based in Philadelphia, with ties to occupied Chumash and Tewa land (California and New Mexico). She is a member of GRAFT Collective, based in Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Louisville, who were Fulcrum Fund recipients in 2017 and CiCA Practitioners in Residence at Concordia University in 2020. McKinnon has shared work at Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and Amos Eno Gallery (NYC), with solo shows at Small Engine Gallery and Harwood Art Center (Albuquerque). She holds an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University in Montréal, and a BFA from the University of New Mexico.
Contact
mckinnoncecilia [at] gmail.com | @dork.fortress