21 Dec The perfect tense
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/86368-the-perfect-tense
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present The perfect tense, its first solo exhibition of new paintings
by Sam McKinniss. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from January 11
through February 23, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 11 from 6 to 8 PM.
McKinniss paints pictures based on pre-existing images found online, transforming visual building blocks
of the public domain into open-ended—and paradoxically personal—documents of emotional life. In many
cases, these images—which often encompass people and scenes from disparate corners of popular culture
or art history—also pre-exist in the minds of their viewers. For McKinniss, the challenge is to re-invest these
images with a material conviction that may re-establish them as sites of real feeling. Images that begin as
relatively generic cultural products thereby become full-spectrum demonstrations of human experience.
As its title suggests, The perfect tense is oriented toward the past. The grammatical term refers to verbs
that indicate actions which have already occurred, and the exhibition is accordingly taken up with themes of
loss, even while it focuses on scenes that are, on the surface, defined by their hilarity, joy, or straightforward
beauty. McKinniss creates the prevailing tension by juxtaposing various examples of outdated public relations,
so that a painting of an open-mouthed, playfully surprised Julia Roberts might exist near a double portrait
of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, of the so-called St. Louis gun-toting incident. Though each composition
makes deft use of negative space, the contextual chasm separating one from the other alludes fundamen
tally to a brush with the void.
Each of the works in The perfect tense depends on its fellows to tell a larger story, a piece of an overarch
ing syntactical structure encompassing the entire exhibition. This novelistic dimension of the work relies on
each of the complex, even contradictory, shades of meaning McKinniss finds in images. This is true even for
pictures whose notoriety or seeming accessibility means that they are passed over lightly by viewers who
have already encountered them in their “natural”, digitally saturated habitats.
For these reasons, McKinniss paints his subjects in ways that foreground the intimacy of touch. The figure
modeling that characterizes several works on view not only puts the experience of light front and center, but
also calls attention to the viscosity of oil paint as a material, grounding the pictures in the immediacy of the
physical world. The original context from which any given image is drawn, even when it is easily identified,
therefore becomes less dominant. Inasmuch as cultural observation plays an important role in McKinniss’s
project, it is a mode by which the artist describes what it means to live, suffer, and engage passionately in
the contemporary world, even if that world is defined, collectively speaking, by its constant pull toward the
superficial read.
The landscape and nature-oriented paintings in the exhibition represent a variety of moods, from the placid,
autumnal calm of the small-scale French king bridge (2024) to the expansive grandeur of Cascade pass
(2024), to the urgent, apocalyptic Forest fire (2024). In each case, a sense of place roots McKinniss’s more
overtly media-oriented paintings in the physical plane. Scattered throughout The perfect tense are clues
that point to the gravitas with which McKinniss is grappling, but tuning into the exhibition’s open-ended, if
melancholic, spirit means that each viewer can begin to find their own bursts of meaning and connection
in likely and unlikely forms. In idyllic images of waterfowl going about their lives, pathos-gilded pictures of
celebrities like Tiger Woods or the ensemble cast of the television series Friends, the empty “Connecticut”
rocking chair that appears in the show’s lone work on paper—absence and longing become open spaces in
which McKinniss cultivates a tempered, world-weary passion that brims with dear life.
Sam McKinniss (b. 1985, Northfield, Minnesota) has been included in recent group exhibitions such as Get
in the game: sports, art, culture, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2024–2025); Day for night: New American
Realism, Palazzo Barberini, organized by the Aïshti Foundation, Rome (2024); Friends and lovers, The FLAG
Art Foundation, New York (2023–2024); and Pictus porrectus: reconsidering the full length portrait,
Art&Newport, Newport, Rhode Island (2022). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions includ
ing the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown,
Massachusetts. McKinniss lives and works in New York and Kent, Connecticut.
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/86368-the-perfect-tense