Opening Reception: Friday, June 1 from 6 – 8pm
Exhibition Runs: June 1 – July 20, 2018
MUSCLE MEMORY explores the phenomena of memory as embodied within place, experienced through sculpture, installation, and textile intervention into everyday objects. The act of dwelling, performed through the habitual and repetitive gestures of domesticity, is one by which an architectural space becomes encoded into our bodies. We contain an experiential knowledge which runs deeper than conscious thought, a bodily familiarity which allows us to find a light switch in the dark or open a tricky lock. The home becomes a container for interwoven layers of time and memory, an archive of the thousands of intimate, mundane, or unremarkable gestures which comprise daily life. Our awareness of the accustomed space extends beyond the boundaries of the body and beyond physical parameters to encompass vast emotional and psychological expanses. What role does the architecture of home play in the mediation of present experience and a continuity of memory? To what extent can we visualize the strange alchemical process by which interior space becomes a living piece of the self?
Cecilia received the SURFACE 2017 Harwood Art Center Solo Exhibition Award, presented annually for artistic excellence, originality of vision and dedication to practice.
About Cecilia McKinnon
Cecilia is an intermedia artist and curator, primarily working in the areas of sculptural installation, textiles, and performance. Her work explores the entropy of both memory and physical place, relying on craft-based interventions, found objects, and abject materials. McKinnon grew up in California, immersed in theater and performance practices. She moved to New Mexico to complete a BFA at the University of New Mexico in 2010, where she studied printmaking and sculpture, in addition to participating in Land Arts of the American West. She has performed and presented work in a variety of exhibition and festival venues, including Bread and Puppet Theater, Titwrench Festival, SOMOS ABQ, the Anderson Abruzzo International Balloon Museum, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. She currently performs in experimental solo songwriting project Star Canyon, as well as with noise collective Milch de la Máquina, and women’s music festival organizers Gatas y Vatas. She is a founding member of GRAFT collective, an art and curatorial collective based out of the Barelas neighborhood in Albuquerque. ceciliamckinnonart.com
“I currently work in the areas of sculptural installation, textiles, and performance, exploring the entropy of both memory and physical place through the lens of traditionally gendered fiber crafts. Construction remnants and domestic artifacts are salvaged from alleys, junkyards, and desert dump sites, and are subjected to “repairs” which ultimately render them useless. Found objects and materials are woven, wrapped, bound, and bandaged, accumulating a skin of fiber that blocks permeable surfaces and limits movement, mimicking the distortions and erosion of memories over time. These works constitute a material response to a culture of excess and upheaval, alluding via the personal and intimate scale of a home to the politics of scarcity and abandonment in the American West.” – Cecilia McKinnon