Installation view.
Installation view.
Frances Adair Mckenzie’s practice negotiates the fluidity of high and low culture as put forth by experimental feminist artists, writers and theorists. As an extension of her video practice, in recent years Mckenzie began building out from the flat digital realm intosculpture. Mckenzie’s sculptural explorations in “Day of Y” examine a suspended, abject corporeality — wax cast and soldered glass works fuse fragility with architectural strength, transparency with busy latticed networks, and a rigidity that dissolves into fluidity. Through reflection, staging, and form, the work pays tribute to the exploratory initiatives of early female video artists and contemporary theorists, while demanding recognition of the importance of poetic narratives that live outside the concept of culture as commodity.
Frances Adair Mckenzie (b. 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal, whose practice includes video installation, sculpture, and animation. She holds a diploma in New Media from B.C.I.T. and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. Several of her animations and a stop-motion virtual reality piece have been commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada.
The sun also rises
on milk tits tilted to lips,
cat paws invoiced in clay,
before shapelessness got baked as bricks,
should units induce the step,
as any mid-20s woman who wept,
whilst insipid signatures in pale light
kept snagging, like streamers,
on sections of sidewalk & damp pink
parking permits as the arrival of
a new day levée:
come and intaglio,
forego the smells, cavities, & wells
which spell radio that hilltops do not host;
come get laced, lurid like glows
from apartment windows
laminating sand as shaky shorelines,
fireflies as sequinned teeth, stray particles,
recombined as chatter…we
appear thin, only to get fatter…
whilst tinted fingertips permanently dissolve
into premonitions of another kind of
floor: reaching 4 eyeliner, lighter, phone,
we be gossamer photons in wake of dew,
pinned to the lining of this morning cone,
as the length of your arm;
which can be traced to liquidity, laced ornamentally,
or bent, conversely, to compress
as the day of
Y.
“Y” by David Armstrong Six
on milk tits tilted to lips,
cat paws invoiced in clay,
before shapelessness got baked as bricks,
should units induce the step,
as any mid-20s woman who wept,
whilst insipid signatures in pale light
kept snagging, like streamers,
on sections of sidewalk & damp pink
parking permits as the arrival of
a new day levée:
come and intaglio,
forego the smells, cavities, & wells
which spell radio that hilltops do not host;
come get laced, lurid like glows
from apartment windows
laminating sand as shaky shorelines,
fireflies as sequinned teeth, stray particles,
recombined as chatter…we
appear thin, only to get fatter…
whilst tinted fingertips permanently dissolve
into premonitions of another kind of
floor: reaching 4 eyeliner, lighter, phone,
we be gossamer photons in wake of dew,
pinned to the lining of this morning cone,
as the length of your arm;
which can be traced to liquidity, laced ornamentally,
or bent, conversely, to compress
as the day of
Y.
“Y” by David Armstrong Six