“Flight of Fancy--walk through history
At the core of my idea for this space is for fronting “The Decorative.” That is, softening the architecture with a cloth covering that is loosely hung, and is painted in gray monotone as a kind of remembrance of things past. Much like my memory of a palace in Palermo, Sicily -- which may be a memory or may be a compilation of fiction, like various movie scenes combined together—it becomes an historic working of a grand space that makes it something altogether different; to even being transformed into an open space as an experience made almost virtual: the Swallows, not rendered as realistic, but still come off as oddly convincing. One’s eye moves, rather than the Swallows, making the sky seem animated.
This spirit of play came to me as a young artist looking particularly at the Chinoserie focus within the Roccoco movement of the mid to late 18th century. It featured “fetes,” in Italy -- parades with banners, exotic animals (particularly monkeys), and allusions to the exoticism of China as was developing through the spice trade—spices, silk cloth, and the imagery on ceramics to fabrics, to a different way of conceiving space as being not symmetrical, but at times asymmetrical. I started with some very small Chinese paper cuts that I found at John Coles Books in La Jolla in 1975 or 1976, and blew them up in size, made of cardboard and paper that gave the pieces a three dimensional quality. They were placed between large painted loose hanging strips of sewn cloth for an exhibition called “Arabesque.” These cardboard decorations (like the paper Vase decoration on one of the dining room walls) and the loose cloth softened the architecture and transformed the space in to something unexpected.
I’ve since played with the idea of transforming architectural spaces in various ways, but particularly by “layering” a background with paintings, photographs, or other objects over laid. This idea first struck me while I was in Mysore, South India in 1980 studying Yoga. I was also trying to use my time there to paint. The paintings, gouache on paper, were not quite working. One day I was in a small coffee house nearby writing postcards home. A group of young men gathered around me and started naming the scenes or actresses or monuments in the cards I had with me.
Their interest in the subject matter struck me as the solution to the artistic problem that I had: simply stick postcards on the abstract paintings. Which I did using broom straw to “sew” them to the paper since glue was hard to find. These “Postcard Paintings,” or this layering, of content and abstract background began to move from two dimensional works to three dimensional living spaces.
The installation “Flight of Fancy” stems from this very seminal happenstance. It has flowed through many installations over since -- the painting of Holly Solomon’s library, hanging some of her painting collection over the original, French decorative cloth wall covering in 1984.
After an extended journey around Sub-Saharan West and Central Africa in the early 1980’s I began to think about a different kind of approach to both differing cultural aesthetics and issues of class and taste. In 1987 and into the mid 1990’s, after a second trip around many of the same Sub Saharan countries, in 1989-1990, I started making paintings using cotton flocking to imitate the textural references to both “Kuba Cloth,” from Burkina Faso, and Mexican velvet painting, from Tijuana, exhibiting them over a painted linear abstract background inspired by traditional paintings from Cameroon meant to protect a household compound from evil spirit by capturing the spirits in a painted web and channeling the spirits to the fire hearth.
Three examples follow below:
“Decoc Terrae Africano,” Aspen Art Center, 1990;
Holly Solomon Gallery Booth, Foire International d’Art Contemporain (FIAC), Grand Palais, Paris, 1992;
“Furniture L’Isola,” Cappellini International Interiors, Milan Furniture Fair, 1989;
The loose painted cloth is a direct antecedent to the present dining room “tapestry” and was meant to contextualize an imagined history.
The paintings, photographs, and objects in “Flight of Fancy” come from several bodies of work over many years and in themselves represent this idea of over layering in many cases.
Frames, framing, or isolating different parts of a larger painting; postcards overlaying an abstract painted background; the ghost images being overlayed by a painting or a plate; the chandelier with its Venitian inspired glass figures overlaying all that is on the walls, including the ceiling .
The title “Flight of Fancy,“ as this dining room installation is named, derives certainly from the Swallows, and from the photograph of two boys dressed with shiny ribbons for a Indian holiday commemorating siblings, brings to mind a “Salon” in which it is a dining room, but also a stage of sorts, where the guests are just that, guests at dinner, but also actors and audience as well. The unfamiliarity of the surroundings seem some how familiar, like something from a dream, and the images, both paintings and photographs, the Swallows flitting about in the rendered sky overhead, and the small glass Venetian figures on the re-made chandelier create a mysterious but soothing dramatic environment that allows all to party on in good spirit.
The source of the painted Swallows
I had an exhibition at the La Jolla Museum in 1976 titled “Collection Applied Design,” based on an “Ad book” printed in Hong Kong. The catalogue that was produced for the exhibition was fan shaped and made reference to China in other ways as well. The Swallows occupied the last two pages opened out into a full fan. For many years after, my Grandmother had the open Swallow pages pinned to her bedroom wall.
The Chandelier has been customized. The small glass figures on the candle sticks were made in an artist’s residency at Pilchuck Glass school in Washington State in the 1990’s. Formally, I was working with a master glass blower on a series of figures that were inspired by 18th and 19th century Venetian jesters and clowns, or exotic figures with baggy pants and slippers with turned up toes, riding fish or Turtles, or balancing on one hand on a ball while spinning hoops. In the meantime I was also mining the glass dump for odd pieces of glass from projects that didn’t work out for the students or even faculty. I arranged what I had collected in a special kiln for baking glass so that it melts and bonds with any glass object touching or riding over or under. In keeping with the Venetian theme, I placed the glass pieces so as to evoke figures with baggy pants and pointed slippers, turbans and such to be as exotic as possible. The chandelier holds most of what I made. The pieces have been set aside for more than20 years waiting for the right chandelier, and this is it. The glass baubles came from the Corning Glass dump outside of Pittsburgh, collected on a chance outing when visiting the area a few years later.
The loose cloth hanging on all the walls and painted loosely in grey is comprised of
A mix of images framed and hung salon style meant as a reference to the distant past and provides a cultural reference for the works that are hung over the cloth. History being replaced. The breeze that might move the loose cloth is in a sense the passing of time.
The large framed photograph at the center of the main dining room wall, is part of a series of twelve photographic works taken in and around Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and the canal connecting all three cities, in 1997. These twelve works were attached to a two line stanza of 12 couplets in a 13th century poem by the poet philosopher Liu Ji, an admonishment on how to live ones life. This photo, a statue in a pond in Suzhou, of a boy fishing, is connected to this couplet:
Do not fall prey to thoughts of hurt and pain, regrets in your heart.
Like a river in flood all this affects others.”
The photos were chosen for how the images might reflect the struggle between traditional craft and the modernization of both society and the change in aesthetic values pressuring Chinese society in the 1980’s and 90’s. The translation—in fact the poem itself was chosen by a young student from Hong Kong named, Cici Lee, who also did the calligraphy for all the pieces in “New China.” I worked with her on polishing the translation. Besides the Chinese calligraphy, I wrote an English version in “vertical running script.”
“Venetian Scene,” above “Boy Fishing,” to the left, extends the Venetian theme introduced by the chandelier, and is from a series meant to be like a print, but not printed, and instead repeated, of a scene of Venice’s Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica in the back ground with a gondola in the open waters of the lagoon. The series was painted on cotton flocked paper, found in Tijuana, and repeated in several colored ground versions, on cardboard with raised gold cardboard frame.
“Breakers at Even Tide, by Baroni” is below “Venetian Scene,” and is a multi image painting on canvas with frames placed over two sections of the surface dividing the images into different but connected smaller units. The images come from my collection of Chinese ad books, an encyclopedic collection of subjects and graphic images that I worked exclusively from between 1975 and 1985. The painting, one of several that I made and exhibited in the mid 1980’s, was part of an effort to push what I had been doing on cloth hangings, and gouache on paper. I had been painting on canvas, but began to experiment with isolating the images with different framing, --shifting the reading of the images from what they were as a single composition.
This interest in framing the image is carried out in three other paintings in the installation, but as singular image compositions derived from a singular graphic image, and built out with color and or texture. The “Owl,” “ Bull Ring,” and “Monument “ (or Arc d’ Triumph) are all part of this play. The Owl is like an Ad, with the caption above (which translates as, Animal); the Bull Ring is a graphic image fleshed out for color and somewhat comic travel poster form; and, Arc d’ Triumph as a kind of commercial image sold as a souvenir--you were here. In these works and others at the time, I am nibbling around the corners of various kinds of art practice application, be it advertizing, commercial painting or other practices on the edges of the question: what is painting? These and many other pieces were part of a number of exhibitions all titled “Western Painting,” a title that even I do not understand.
“Saludos de Tijuana (Iran),” which I call a postcard painting, the likes of which I’ve been playing with since 1980, placing post cards on an abstract painted surface in one way or another, with postcards from India, Jamaica, Liberia, Mexico, and more. Here, I’m using a brightly colored up beat postcard, “Saludos de Tijuana,” to convey fun: Jai alai, Casinos , Dancing, and popular since the 1920’s as a get-away vacation in a foreign country right next door. The foreignness of the culture was the attraction but Tijuana also had a different and not so savory reputation, as well as a sense of danger—certainly another attraction. That duality can be applied to many places and cultures and I have used Saludos de Tijuana to introduce this mix of fun and danger into any number of cultural portrayals. This post card painting being about the Near East, particularly Iran, plays on some cultural stereotypes: the overly ornate frame (plastic foam), the veiled (barely) woman in the lenticular photo both winks and beckons and draws the veil across her face, women musicians as exotic harem dancers (a card from Robert Kushner of an early drawing of his), and the bloody battle of demons and a goddess, all being played out in the context of an antique map of Iran and the Arabian Peninsula--Saludos, wish you were here. This description strays a bit from the Near Eastern scene, as The Goddess slaying the demons is Indian and in the upper right corner is the Petroleum Monument, “La Diana” in Mexico City, but still plays into the sense of the exotic from both Iran and Tijuana alike.
There is another post card painting titled, “Pilgrims” which is handled very differently, as most of the postcards used are partially embedded in the paint, brushed out partly, or scribbled around. Pictured is a freeway clover leaf crossover, Mexican farmers at a country market gathering potatoes or oranges, a man dressed as a Puritan in front of a classic New England door, and an image of a well dressed man and woman seeming to be looking at unseen items in bins on a Tijuana street.
So-- in these paintings I am employing much the same play as in the ad book pieces, particularly a series called “10 items or less” which was my first foray into using the books’ images as subject matter (in which I painted graphic images with brush and ink in a composition that could be read in any direction). The number 10 was arbitrary, making a plausible relationship of what is depicted—and what the postcards as a form of souvenir convey about memory and communication. A mystery of sorts built around what we as humans seem to frequently try to put together as having some kind of meaning, or connection.
“Dibujo #10,” is a small cotton flocking abstract with a Tijuana velvet painting frame, the flocking imitating velvet, one of many such pieces in many sizes done in the late 1980’s into early 1990’s, which were a mash up of velvet painting and something called Kuba Cloth, from Burkina Faso, a raffia weaving that created a pile surface somewhat like velvet, but scratchier. The small plate below (by Izhar Patkin, who I have collaborated with on many projects) of a ceramic glazed image of a Greek woman from antiquity, but on everyday restaurant table ware. Another ceramic plate painted by Jean is of a young woman being chased by a loosely toga’d satyr in pursuit. A small decal stamp gives it away that the plate has been “discounted..”
The “Vase,” painted paper and cardboard, hanging on the one of the two corner walls between the curtains, is taken from some small Chinese paper cut pieces from John Coles Books (now La Jolla Historical Society) that I bought in 1975. Also on that wall, is “Movie Marquee and Boys,” a photograph of two boys celebrating “Rakhi Bandhan,” an Indian holiday of sibling love and respect. The photo is set in a painted cardboard frame with mirrors. They both are dressed “Fancy” in metallic streamers and waist bands in front of a movie marquee, in Chennai, South India. This is one of many snapshot photos taken on travels to India, and through Sub-Sahara, West and Central Africa in which I used cardboard as a framing device cut and painted in ways that create patterns and that lend a feeling of place to the range of small photo collages, which in itself comes from my interest in “every day” snapshot panoramas of places I am travelling through as a tourist.
“Bull Resting Under a Tree” is an abstract rendering of a bull that was a part of an exhibition titled “Bull Story,” and was focused on how different cultures regard this animal-- from worship, as in Hindu Indian culture, to how its identity becomes a play of light and dark in the Spanish or Mexican bull fight. There were three distinct versions that were shown: in Tijuana, San Diego, and New York. In each venue, Jean and I created a very large (the largest at 12’ x 16” x 16”) sculpture of a “Nandi,” Shiva’s vehicle, made to imitate the massive Granite boulder carvings in South India, but out of split Arunndo grass (like bamboo) and paper Mache’ with paintings and photographs and other objects creating a visual and perceptual contrast or connection.
The photographic collage, “Sita Ram and The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini” (by Jan van Eyck), is from an unfinished series titled “Hieronymus Bosch in Bali.” The series revolves around Dutch colonization of Bali during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Balinese revolt in the 1940’s and early 1950’s when the Dutch forcibly put the rebellion down. The Dutch colonization now replaced by Tourism, another kind of colonization that has affected the Balinese culture. Regardless of the impact of both historic and contemporary influences, this collaged photograph creates a link between the two if only superficially. This photograph, for me, represents the formality of the European and the sensuality of the Balinese. Even with the historical polarities of both the Netherlands (Protestant) and Balinese (Hindu) cultures, the likeness of both Rama and Sita and Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife are still so close as to be two sides of the same coin.
Two Figures made from plastic beach flotsam and jetsam. On the left of the window a clown figure made from a discarded pressurized “American Cheese” can with an oversized plastic bottle head. On the right hand side of the curtain is a small angular figure made from a comb and other objects as though it is a small animist sculpture from the Dogon tribe of Eastern Mali, both from an exhibition In 1994 called “The age of Plastic,” previewing the end of the last century, and inspired by an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1992, called “Picasso and the Age of Steel” featuring sculptural works by artists using scrap steel and metal as sculpture elements in to the military buildup to World War I. Artists seemingly using even conflict to engage the world in seeing behind the curtain.
The curtains in the openings are meant to establish a sense of the Contemporary and reflect the overlay of time on history, represented by the grey painted cloth walls that the paintings and photographs and other objects adorn. The backs of the curtains have a painted scrim attached that is the same pattern as the cloth painting. When separated by a breeze or simply walking by, there is a moray effect that lifts the pattern away from the cloth and creates a subtle optical illusion.
The curtain across the front window and doors create a scene that is a link from an imagined pond with water lilies and goldfish, to vegetation, to sky, to the Swallows flying free.
-Kim MacConnel
About Kim MacConnel
Kim MacConnel received his BA from UCSD in 1969, the first graduating class in Visual Arts and, in 1972, the first MFA graduating class. He was hired as a lecturer in 1975; an assistant professor from 1978-1980, and was appointed professor in 1987. He chaired the department from 1992-1996. He retired from UCSD in 2009.
He was represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York from 1975-2002, Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles from 2002-2016, and has been represented by Quint Gallery in La Jolla from 1986 to the present. He was one of the principal founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the early 1970’s. His work has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibitions in 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1985; The Museum of Modern Art's “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984.” and the Venice Biennale, 1984. The Santa Monica Museum of Art hosted “Parrot Talk” (a retrospective) in 2003. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego hosted “Collection Applied Design” (a retrospective), in 2010. The most recent body of work, begun in 2011 and continues, called ABRACADABRA, includes two large murals that were commissioned for the new Federal Court House in San Diego in 2013. His work from the 1970’s along with other Pattern and Decoration artists were exhibited at the Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst, in Aachen Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK) Vienna, and Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest in 2018 and 2019. As well, his work was exhibited at the Muusee D’Art Moderne Et Contemporain, in Geneva Switzerland, and Le Consortium Museum, Dijon France, in 2018 and 2019. The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, exhibition “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972—1985” took place in 2019 and travelled to The Hessel Museum, Bard College in New York in 2021.
He has shown extensively in group exhibitions in museums and galleries nationally and internationally.
Beside reviews in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, Flash Art, multiple exhibition catalogues and other publications in Europe and America. MacConnel has also been included in "Painting and Sculpture since 1940, An American Renaissance," Sam Hunter; “Art Since Mid Century,” Daniel Wheeler; "The History of Modern Art, 3rd edition," Harvard Arnason; "The Power of Feminist Art," Norma Broude and Mary Garrard; "Art of the Postmodern Era;”Irving Sandler; “The American Century—Art and Culture 1950—2000,” Lisa Philips and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and; “With Pleasure Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972—1985,“ Anna Katz and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
