Roy McMakin
Encyclopedia
Lander, Wyoming
Lander is a city in, and the county seat of, Fremont County, Wyoming, United States. Named for transcontinental explorer Frederick W. Lander, Lander is located in central Wyoming, along the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River. A tourism center with several dude ranches nearby, Lander is located just...
) is a Seattle-based artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, designer
Designer
A designer is a person who designs. More formally, a designer is an agent that "specifies the structural properties of a design object". In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a...
and furniture
Furniture
Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...
maker. His furniture bridges the gap between art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
and design. Some of his pieces are entirely non-functional like Untitled (Wooden Toilet), which, as its title suggests, is an unpainted wooden toilet
Toilet
A toilet is a sanitation fixture used primarily for the disposal of human excrement, often found in a small room referred to as a toilet/bathroom/lavatory...
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 pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
s 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
Shag (fabric)
A shag is a rug or carpet that has a deep pile, giving it a shaggy appearance. Shag carpeting is sometimes evoked as an example of the esthetic from the culture of the 1970s in the United States....
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
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, 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.
Curator Michael Darling has argued that McMakin’s intellectual tack to furniture was informed by his artistic education at the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
, which “was a hotbed of artistic engagement with the everyday. From Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, inventor of the Happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
, to domestic conceptualist
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
Eleanor Antin
Eleanor Antin
Eleanor Antin is an American photographer, author, and artist working with video, film, performance, and drawing. Originally from New York, USA, she is currently based in Southern California where she is a professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego...
, environmental art
Environmental art
The term environmental art is used in two different contexts: it can be used generally to refer to art dealing with ecological issues and/or the natural, such as the formal, the political, the historical, or the social context....
pioneers Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison… the UCSD faculty espoused boundary-breaking, experimental approaches to art-making.” 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
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
; the Henry Art Gallery
Henry Art Gallery
The Henry Art Gallery is the art museum of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. Located on the west edge of the university's campus along 15th Avenue N.E. in the University District, it was founded in 1927 and was the first public art museum in the state of Washington. The...
in Seattle; and the Portland Art Museum
Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it the oldest art museum on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the United States. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum became one of the twenty-five largest art museums in...
. In 2010, Skira Rizzoli published a comprehensive monograph on McMakin, When Is a Chair Not a Chair. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Founded in the early 1990s by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary art in a variety of media: including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
Selected bibliography
- Darling, Michael. Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2003.
- Johnson, Ken. “Art in Review; Roy McMakin.” New York Times, October 21, 2005, sec. E.
- McMakin, Roy. Charming Homes for Today: Drawings by Roy McMakin, 1996-2002. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003.
- McMakin, Roy. A Month of Drawings in the Cursive Style! New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003.
- Yapelli, Tina. Roy McMakin: A Slat-back Chair. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2005.
- McMakin, Roy. When is a Chair Not a Chair? New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2010.