Roy McMakin

Roy McMakin
Born Roy McMakin
1956
Lander, Wyoming, United States
Nationality American
Education University of California, San Diego (BA) (MA)
Roy McMakin, Untitled (Wooden Toilet), 2005, oiled holly, 66 x 32 x 30 inches.
A detail of Roy McMakin's Untitled (Writing Table and Chair)

Roy McMakin (born 1956 Lander, Wyoming) is a Seattle-based artist, designer, furniture maker, and architect. His furniture bridges the gap between art and design. He began his studies at the Museum Art School in Portland, but soon transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he completed a BA in 1979 and an MA in 1982. At UCSD, he studied conceptual art making, under the likes of Allan Kaprow, Manny Farber, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Patricia Patterson. In 1987, he opened his first showroom on Los Angeles' Beverly Boulevard, called Domestic Furniture Co. Though the showroom closed in 1995, it remains online today and has resumed production with Big Leaf Manufacturing. Additionally, his work has been featured in solo-exhibitions at galleries and museums, he has designed entire houses, and increased the production of his furniture for his showroom. His most recent retrospective was a 20-year survey of the sculptor and furniture designer's oeuvre at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in 2005.[1]

Roy McMakin is represented exclusively by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.[2]

Artistic Career

Influences

McMakin's furniture hints at influences from particular architects, designers, artists, and larger trends in American furniture design. His designs echo the Arts and Crafts tradition, Shaker designs, Art Deco and '50s Functional styles, and even mass-produced American commercial furniture.[3] He also admired architect Irving Gill, a pioneer of early 20th century pre-modern design, the sensitive wood worker, George Nakashima, and artist Scott Burton. In fact, he lived in the 1917 Hancock Park house designed by Irving Gill. Of Gill's house, McMakin said "It seems to be charged with the element of time, that domesticates whatever was off or unusual about the work when it first appeared. […] Small, simple houses need to come back in. We need to be more sparing in the way we spend our natural resources. We need to be caring about the natural limits of our environment." [3] His professor, Allan Kaprow, taught him the basics of conceptual art making and provided him with an artistic community in which to experiment. Some critics have likened his taste for minimalism to the great minimalist artists, such as Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd.[4] While other historians have placed him in an artistic lineage that includes West Coast natives John McLaughlin, Robert Irwin, and Charles Ray.[5]

Style

Some of his pieces are entirely non-functional like Untitled (Wooden Toilet), which, as its title suggests, is an unpainted wooden toilet that serves most usefully as a witty conversation piece more so than an actual toilet. Many of his pieces are inspired by visual and verbal puns and other conceptual conceits: a boudoir in which every drawer is painted a different shade of white and every drawer knob is a slightly different size; or a white shag rug with a black square at its center that has had a quarter of its area shaved away showing that in order for the graphic flatness of the square to be realized, black thread must permeate the entire thickness of the rug, drawing our attention to the three-dimensionality of something that we ordinarily perceive as two-dimensional. McMakin’s art forces us to focus on the ontological complexities of furniture that, while it occupies the same space as sculpture, is not culturally recognized as such. Another example would be his Untitled (Writing Table and Chair), which, while fully functional, is painted a bright pink, making the table and chair appear more as an objet d'art than an actual desk. McMakin's furniture designs first came to public attention in 1987 through his Domestic Furniture showroom on Los Angeles' Beverly Boulevard. That store closed in 1994 when he moved to Seattle to be closer to the woods with which he was working, but selected pieces from that period are still manufactured by his Seattle workshop.

According to curator Michael Darling, McMakin’s intellectual tack to furniture was informed by his artistic education at the University of California, San Diego, which “was a hotbed of artistic engagement with the everyday. From Allan Kaprow, inventor of the Happening, to domestic conceptualist Eleanor Antin, environmental art pioneers Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison… the UCSD faculty espoused boundary-breaking, experimental approaches to art-making.”[6] This boundary-breaking extends to McMakin's growing body of architectural work with his firm Domestic Architecture. Beginning with remodels of homes and office spaces in the 1990s, the artist now has a portfolio of ground-up houses that take his artistic concerns to a new level of ambition and complexity. Notable within the contemporary architectural scene, McMakin's homes freely embrace vernacular idioms, but utilize them in a way that is neither ironic, nostalgic, nor ideological. Borrowing from a wide variety of sources to best address the site, climate, or client's taste and personality, the homes are as engaging to "read" and "deconstruct" from an intellectual standpoint as they are intuitively functional. McMakin's architecture neatly dovetails with his other pursuits in furniture and sculpture, held together by an overarching investigation of how perception influences meaning.

McMakin has been the subject of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; and the Portland Art Museum. In 2010, Skira Rizzoli published a comprehensive monograph on McMakin, When Is a Chair Not a Chair.

Performance

While still at UCSD, McMakin also staged performance pieces that related to furniture. These performances asked questions about the body's relationship to furniture and, perhaps, the world at large. His first performance, in 1980, was titled "Love in a Charles Eames Chair." Of the performance McMakin said:

Love in a Charles Eames Chair was about my dual attraction for order and style and messiness. I was thinking of the [Eames-designed] Rosewood lounge chair, and one was in the pice. […] I was pointing out that it was hard to fuck in that chair, that it implied an optimism that was ultimately rigid and didn't allow a messy circumstance, which life is kinda all about."[5]

Exhibition History

Solo Exhibitions

1980

1981

1982

1986

1987

1987–1988

1992

1997

1999

2000

2001

2003

2003–2004

2004

2005

2006

2006–2007

2007

2007–2008

2008

2009

2010

2010–2011

2012

2013

2014

Group Exhibitions

1982

1984

1985

1986

1997

1997–1998

1998

2000

2000–2001

2001

2003

2003–2005

2004–2005

2006

2007

2007–2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

References

  1. ↑ Kangas, Matthew (September 2005). "Roy McMakin at the Henry Art Gallery". Art in America. 93 (8): 163.
  2. ↑ "Roy McMakin". Garth Greenan Gallery. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  3. 1 2 Whiteson, Leon (January 12, 1990). "Odd and Ordinary". Los Angeles Times.
  4. ↑ McDonald, Robert (February 21, 1987). "The Artist Behind the Ideas". Los Angles Times.
  5. 1 2 Holte, Michael Ned (2010). The Art of Roy McMAkin: When is a Chair not a Chair?. New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications. p. z.
  6. ↑ Michael Darling, Roy McMakin: A Door as Meant as Adornment, (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2003), 4.

Selected bibliography

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