Sara MacKillop
June 05, 2010 — July 17, 2010
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Sara MacKillop Inside sleeves, 2009 Record inner sleeves in record sleeve frames.
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Sara MacKillop installation view, 2010 from left to right:
| Sara MacKillop Picture Sections, 2010 Manipulated found book
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THE GALLERY IS CLOSED FROM JULY 19 THROUGH AUGUST. WE MAY BE REACHED BY E MAIL AND TELEPHONE.
OUR FALL 2010 SEASON OPENS ON SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 11th WITH NEW WORKS BY NICOLAS BAIER.
The work of British artist Sara MacKillop has been described as anti-heroic. Her materials are humble and expendable mass-produced objects typically found in junk shops or simply left out with the trash. Diminutive and utilitarian rather than remarkable in scale or character, the discarded items she selects are recoded through slight interventions that render the familiar enigmatic, even temporally unrecognizable. MacKillop’s deft manipulation of banal objects is performed with an astute sense of context and a keenly observant eye for formal detail. Her re-presentation of such objects affords them an abstract quality with an unexpected degree of visual pleasure for the viewer. Her works often bear an uncanny affinity with the clean-lined, reductive tendencies of art from the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the found objects favoured by MacKillop tend to be recently obsolete, such as typewriter ribbon or LP record sleeves once ubiquitous in the same period as the artistic movements her art may recall. Writing in the Top 10 section of Artforum last October, Ian Kiaer commented on MacKillop’s art: “the utmost economy produces exquisitely beautiful works that draw out modernism’s redundancy without falling into cynical or knowing commentary. It involves showing and telling and passing over in silence.”
MacKillop’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York in March 2011. In 2009 she was nominated by Fiona Banner for the Whitechapel Max Mara Award. Her work was seen at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects in Things We Know in 2007, with works by Mark Bell and Paul Housley. This is her first solo exhibition at the gallery.
MacKillop studied art at Leeds University and received her Masters degree from the Royal Academy in London where she continues to live and work. Her work has been widely exhibited in Britain, as well as in New York, Cologne, Stockholm and Milan.
Artists:
Sara MacKillop