Cathy McClure: Midway

May 26, 2011 - January 22, 2012

"Creepy and cute; provocative and funny; perplexing and satisfying: McClure shows how contemporary metalsmiths can 'move people in a different way.'" -- Bruce Metcalf, Metalsmith Magazine

"A creepy little circus, Cathy McClure's strobe-lit Midway may induce seizures." -- Brian Miller, Seattle Weekly

"[Midway conjures] associations with the kind of shadowy, voyeuristic sideshows that invited spectators to witness thrilling abnormalities or magical feats, experiences that dared people to believe it ... or not.... We want to decipher the mechanics of her contraptions even while we long to lose ourselves in the fantasy." -- Gayle Clemans, The Seattle Times

 

Music, flashing lights, and whirring motors... toys buzzing about, or lined up like prizes on the wall waiting to be won.... The air is thick with the excitement of the carnival—an enveloping sensual feast of light, sound, and movement. If the primary goal of an artwork is to attract attention, the work of Seattle artist Cathy McClure is a tour de force.

Taking her scissors to anonymous playthings and pop culture icons alike, and stripping them of their identities (and attendant commercial roles), McClure delves into the comedy and tragedy of an increasingly fast-paced automated culture. Here, the long neglected carnivals of yesteryear seamlessly morph into a sleek, efficiently mechanized future world.

Midway is an installation caught between eras, and much of its allure and power are vested in its very state of in-betweenness. Although McClure creates a grand illusion through her zoetropic works, she at the same time reveals the workings within, much like another early proponent of the zoetrope concept, Eadweard Muybridge, whose captivating images of horses brought the mechanics of motion to life in the late 19th century. For every revelation, there is yet another ruse, and just as a magician might misdirect our attention to the front of the stage, McClure keeps us balancing between dualities of childhood and adulthood, human and machine, truth and illusion.

– Nora Atkinson, Curator

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cathy McClure is a metalsmith, predominantly working in sterling silver, bronze, and steel, but she has always been attracted to other disciplines, and often includes multimedia components such as music, zoetropes, and video in her work. A constant presence in McClure's artwork has been her preoccupation with mechanical toys and the discrepancy between the perception of an imagined techno-future and that future that we now inhabit, juxtaposed with humor and charm in her elaborate installations.

In 1995, McClure received her BFA from Texas Technological University, followed by her MFA from the University of Washington in 1997, where she studied under Mary Lee Hu. In 1997, the same year she received her MFA, she was selected from a pool of 426 applicants as the recipient of the 19th Annual Betty Bowen Memorial Award. She has exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Milton Hershey School Museum, and Art Miami Basel, and she is currently represented by Edelman Arts and Moss in New York, New York. A Seattle-based artist, this exhibition is McClure's first showing in the Northwest in five years, marking her return to the local stage.

Visit the artist's website at www.cathymcclure.com >

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