White Room: Sara MacKillop

White Columns is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States by the London-based artist Sara MacKillop.

For her White Room exhibition MacKillop will present a discrete group of recent sculptural works that utilize and subtly disrupt commonplace, everyday objects.

Writing about MacKillop’s practice the British curator Andrew Hunt has observed:

“Fundamentally, MacKillop’s re-coding of objects as unfamiliar and strange has the effect of drops in a pond that reverberate beyond their initial impact. Her radically small interventions scramble the logic of everyday ephemera, and act as micro events that affect and complicate perception in a refined and unexpected fashion.”

Taking the legacies of both minimalism and conceptualism as her departure points MacKillop invests a quiet precision in her often disarmingly modest and deceptively informal gestures. Using found materials that typically have some relationship to the hand (e.g. pens, suspension files, balls of string, etc.) MacKillop applies her own particular logic to re-purposing these objects as art. Staged together in a kind of mise-en-scene or quasi-theatrical tableau, there is a dead-pan – or even tragic-comic – humor at play in these gestures. Attracted to increasingly anachronistic objects, MacKillop’s work evinces a form of melancholia, if not exactly nostalgia, for an entire category of once useful products (e.g. the fax machine paper rolls, she folds concertina-style into artist’s books.) Mackillop’s process might perhaps be thought of as a kind of informal formalism, her goal a gentle subversion of norms, the result of which is to create works that – despite their barely-there-ness – maintain an uncanny presence.

Sara MacKillop lives and works in London, England. She received an MA in Painting from London’s Royal College of Art in 2001 and a BA in Fine Art from Leeds University in 1996. Her work has been shown extensively over the past decade including solo exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Art, Dundee, Scotland (2010): Salle de Bains, Lyon, France (2010); Jessica Bradley Art and Projects, Toronto, Canada (2010); and the Saison Poetry Library with the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London (2010.) She has published nine artists books, and for White Columns she has produced ‘1 Day Diary’ the 36th edition of White Columns occasional ‘zine ‘The W.C.’ – which is available to purchase from the gallery.

For further information about this project, contact: info@whitecolumns.org