Frances Adair Mckenzie’s practice negotiates the fluidity of high and low culture as put forth by experimental feminist artists, writers and theorists. As an extension of her video practice, in recent years Mckenzie began building out from the flat digital realm into embodied sculptural space. Mckenzie’s sculptural explorations in “Day of Y” examine a suspended, abject corporeality — wax cast and soldered glass works fuse fragility with architectural strength. The animated piece, “Four Eyes,” incorporates Mckenzie’s sculptural practice into a lens-based vocabulary, considering the act of looking via a splitting and converging stereoscopic vision.  

 

The material language of found, repurposed glass and cast-off corporeality creates a cross referencing pattern connecting production, duration, desire and consumption. This all combines in the abstract record of perceived temporality to form a landscape, one that can be seen equally as a form of deterioration and construction. Through reflection, staging, and form, the work pays tribute to the exploratory initiatives of early female video artists and contemporary theorists, while demanding recognition of the importance of poetic narratives that live outside the concept of culture as commodity.

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Day of Y

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The sun also rises 

on milk tits tilted to lips, 

cat paws invoiced in clay, 

before shapelessness got baked as bricks, 

should units induce the step, 

as any mid-20,s woman who wept, 

whilst insipid signatures in pale light 

kept snagging, like streamers, 

on sections of sidewalk & damp pink 

parking permits as the arrival of 

a new day levée: 

come and intaglio, 

forego the smells, cavities, & wells 

which spell radio that hilltops do not host; 

come get laced, lurid like glows 

from apartment windows 

laminating sand as shaky shorelines, 

fireflies as sequinned teeth, stray particles,

recombined as chatter…we 

appear thin, only to get fatter…

whilst tinted fingertips permanently dissolve 

into premonitions of another kind of 

floor: reaching 4 eyeliner, lighter, phone, 

we be gossamer photons in wake of dew, 

pinned to the lining of this morning cone,

as the length of your arm; 

which can be traced to liquidity, laced ornamentally, 

or bent, conversely, to compress 

as the day of 

Y.

 

David Armstrong Six

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