When Roy McMakin was in his late teens, he fell into a depression. His
mother packed him into her car and drove not to a doctor but to antique stores. Steering him down the isles, she held up various objects and
said, “Do you like this one?”
The consolation of things. McMakin
and Jeffry Mitchell became friends 15 years ago over their mutual love
of furniture, found objects, the shiny new and the well-worn, the turn
of a phrase, art history. Both are devotees of fluid conjunctions and make work in their overlaps.
Earlier this year, they went shopping in
Centralia (droopy lumber town rich in castoffs) and purchased 30
objects which they winnowed down to 12. Each created an object in
response to the found one, all of which became an exhibit at Pulliam Gallery
in Portland, titled, by exchanging the letters of their first names, Joy and Reffry.
The show is beautifully but not literally hung. The audience is free to group found object and responses as it chooses, turning observers into collaborators. Each set of three assembled by collector is for sale for $3,600, $1,200 each to Mitchell, McMakin and the gallery.
Below, three sets assembled by me, with an extra, eight-legged found object.
1. The wisk whisk broom looks like woven hair with a top knot covered in gel, a bottom corner dipped in ashes.
McMakin made it (relatively) new again, a new broom sweeping clean.
Mitchell’s ceramic pair of guys who beam with fresh confidence is titled, The handsomest men in the world.
2. This happy ghost bank has seen better days. Although not evident in the photo, someone cracked open its base to get its undoubtedly meager store of cash.
Mitchell’s Ghost is a thin wash of white that rests on its own eyeballs.
McMakin conceived of a ghost as a loss. The words in cut out and pencil lettering, are, “This world is borrowed and incomplete,” from the lyrics of a Tift Merritt song.
3. Tea pot as air freshner, once the scent is gone, and inset with a mirror.
Mitchell turned the mirror into an absence, the open mouth of a jar.
Classic McMakin word play:
One more image, which I believe is the real model for Mitchell’s Handsomest Men in the World. Anyone at all familiar with McMakin’s furniture will marvel that he found these chairs in a junk shop. It’s his work on the shabby cheap.
John Baldessari once observed that he shared large chunks of McMakin’s vision:
A love of minimalism (while slightly poking fun at it), a Mattisean love of color, a goal of keeping others off balance, and a love of removal/absence, a quest for the paradox of simplicity and complexity. But overall, a mission to sharpen perception, it’s a significant accomplishment to get one to really see and understand a chair (and not feel self-conscious in sitting on it). I don’t think Roy has designed an ironing board yet, but I’m sure it would double as a painting. (from profile here.)
About Mitchell, I’ve written, in various places:
Hairless bears in creamy slips…generosity and
grace… conjunctions of feeling and form…. fusion of
history and fleeting moment…His great gift is an ability to turn a chaos of sources into a coherent visual stream, what 16th-century Italian Baldassare Castiglione identified in “The Courtier” as a nobleman’s highest grace, to have “sprezzatura,” a casual manner of doing a difficult thing well…
Mitchell’s casual grace masks bountiful skill. He drapes the shaggy world in silks and puts a top hat on the tawdry… He’s is a potter, but he’s also a painter and faux-fur sculptor. He works in clay, oil paint, watercolor, glass, latex, plaster, monoprints, paper, paper cutouts and wood.
There’s a two-part catalog from Publication Studio available through the gallery.
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