Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce “Chest” an exhibition of sculpture, furniture and drawings by Seattle based artist Roy McMakin. The exhibition’s title forms the basis for the show, as it explores the relationship between the word Chest and its various manifestations in sculpture, furniture and the human body.
Conceptual art, craft and function merge to form a genre unique to McMakin. Untitled (Expanding Bed), 2004, for example, takes on an anthropomorphic quality with lines derived from the expansion of a breathing human chest. In another work, a chest of drawers is carved with the form of an oval solar plexus, combining word play with a sensuous human form.
Trained as an artist, McMakin has been a strong presence in Los Angeles since the founding of Domestic Furniture in 1987. As Michael Darling, MOCA curator, has stated: “Roy… is a wholly original interpreter of Southern California design history, and the author of a witty, sensible, sensual, and memory-ladenlanguage of furniture forms…Often imitated, these objects are created for use and comfort, but equally as meditations upon cherished notions of good design. By toying with scale, detail, and painted color, McMakin calls upon what he describes as a “non-specific memory” of such familiar styles as Shaker, Mission, Arts and Crafts, and classic modernism, as well as anonymous vernacular designs of American mass-produced furniture from the first half of the 20th century.”
This exhibition comes on the heels of the artist’s recent mid-career survey, Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment in 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles. The exhibition also traveled to the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004.
Born in 1956 in Lander, Wyoming, McMakin studied at the University of California in San Diego where he received his BA and MFA. In 1994, he relocated Domestic Furniture to Seattle, where he currently lives and works. McMakins’ clients range from private patrons to such major cultural institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, whose office furnishings and interiors he conceived in a large-scale commission that brought the designer to public prominence.
McMakin’s work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries across the United States, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Seattle Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. He was included in the first Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum National Design Triennial. McMakin has just completed an outdoor sculpture project for the University of San Francisco which opened in September of 2004.