Building on Canvas: Sarah McKenzie and the New American Landscape
SW: A lot of the shows you’ve been involved with in the last couple of years have dealt with architecture, suburbs, planning, etc. Why do you think that artists and curators now are interested in that kind of work?
SM: Well, suburbia specifically… I remember seeing this article, I think it was in The New York Times Magazine maybe two or three years ago, but it might have been more than that. I think it might have even been written by David Brooks. It was about how we are an economy, or (laughs) we were an economy, based on home building. I was already painting the aerials of suburbia at this time, so this obviously hit home for me, but I do think that he was really right in summing it up that way. I don’t know that people in New York feel it, but when you live in a place like the Denver metro area where over the course of ten years you just watch a landscape completely change from all this sort of big open space to suddenly these vast developments of new homes, you realize how much that local economy is driven by developers and builders and architects. So I think for a lot of artists it’s really just a reflection of that constant, ubiquitous new development that you see everywhere that you go. I think that’s why it just sort of crept into the art world.
I was just talking to another artist at lunch about what’s going to happen now that the economy has shifted, and obviously the mortgage crisis. Those new developments that have been built within the last couple of years in Colorado, I think they’re having a hard time finding buyers, and we’re certainly hearing the horror stories of what’s happening out in Las Vegas and Florida. I assume it’s going to change the way people see my work, and it’ll probably eventually change my work, although I don’t know how yet.
But guess I just think that construction is something that’s very pervasive in our lives. You can’t drive down a road without being aware of it. I kind of came into this in grad school. I was painting abandoned buildings in Detroit, and then I moved from southeast Michigan, which was a very depressed economy, especially Detroit, to Colorado, which was a booming economy at the time. And so to me it was just the juxtaposition, these two things coexisting in America, these really damaged old midwestern industrial cities that are falling apart and then these booming suburbs. So to me it was a natural thing to go from painting one to looking at another.
Me parece interesante seguir el trabajo de esta artista. Tiene una vision bastante clara del impacto del proceso de urbanizacion progresiva del planeta. Creo que sus ideas son mas interesantes que sus pinturas...pero es solo una primera impresion.
