Seattle’s Roy McMakin

Posted By Lauren

I saw this arts listing in today’s copy of the Portland Mercury. I’m going to try to go to this if I can find the time between now and Sunday (when it ends) and the $10 it costs to get into the Portland Art Museum. The exhibit has apparently been on display since the end of September, but this is the first I’ve heard about it.

Here’s the review from the Mercury by John Motley:
Roy McMakin
Trained at the Portland Museum Art School three decades ago, McMakin has built a body of work that uses furniture and interior spaces to explore the tension between form and function. In an age when stylized surface is often privileged above practical application, McMakin’s creations blend the lines between art object and mundane household furnishings. The four untitled works in the APEX installation–all made specifically for the exhibition–revolve around slat-back chairs positioned in various relationships to panels. In one work, two chairs foreground two panels. In another, the two shortened front legs of a chair rest on a raised platform. The chairs are reductive, even iconic, but their contours are so rigid that they hardly seemed designed for the human body. While the geometric composition of McMakin’s chairs references a whole cadre of minimalist artists, the works in APEX lack the visual impact necessary to coax a viewer into scrutinizing them. Ultimately, these forms about form are much too drab to inspire the kind of dialogue McMakin seems to pursue.

For those of you who want more, here’s a more detailed review of McMakin’s at portlandart.net.

Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park
(503) 226-2811

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