Chris Ashley

Joe McKay (2006) (Photo: Chris Ashley)

Joe McKay’s extremely diverse body of work includes live color mixing sessions to approximate a fading sun; screenings of accidental videos made with digital cameras; and the website Prereview, where he reviews movies that haven’t yet come out. As versatile conceptually as he is materially, what drives McKay’s work is social interaction—his pieces usually require viewer interactivity to make them fully come to life. Here, Oakland-based artist and weblogger Chris Ashley introduces the media art of Joe McKay.

Over the course of five evenings last fall, in a field behind Joe McKay’s studio at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, small groups gathered to watch him paint the sunset. During the first night only a few people were present, but word got out and the crowds grew for successive presentations of Sunset Solitaire. Facing west, McKay manipulated a small controller box with three sliding switches, one each for red, green, and blue. Connected to a laptop and running the Director program, the box enabled him to mix horizontal bands of color. The resulting image was projected onto a free-standing building in the field, all under a darkening sky.

The audience watched as McKay attempted to match his digitally painted sunset, mixed live, to the real sunset as it slowly and quietly transitioned from blue to orange to fiery pink before finally fading to indigo. Appearing side-by-side, the actual and projected sunsets sometimes merged and sometimes remained jarringly distinct. An exhilarating meeting of pastoral and technological was found in the wonder and pleasure of watching a gorgeous sunset in the company of others, and the fugitive illusionism achieved when McKay’s simulated sky momentarily matched the real one to produce a seamless vista was awe-inspiring. Even documented as a 30-minute DVD, the work contains startling moments when the blend of elements from the natural and digital worlds is hypnotic and truly sublime.

Joe McKay View of Sunset Solitaire (2005)

Sunset Solitaire references computer games, of course, in this case one played by an individual and watched by others, but there are a range of other associations. The Hudson River School painters and Mark Rothko’s glowing rectangles readily come to mind, as do the evocatively nostalgic memories of drive-in movies (for those of a certain age) or less anxious manifestations of ’60s light shows (for those of another certain age). While presenting Sunset Solitaire McKay becomes a deejay who mixes color rather than sound. There is a sleight of hand at work when he matches the fading sun’s color exactly; an effect that’s pure trompe l’oeil. One might think of Vasari’s anecdote about Giotto painting a fly on one of Cimabue’s paintings, which the older master tried to shoo away, or of Alexander the Great's horse neighing in recognition at the portrait painted by Apelles.

McKay calls Sunset Solitaire an "intervention" rather than a performance. Perhaps this is because he responds to different environmental conditions that can’t be reliably replicated each time he presents the piece. Or perhaps it is because it is the viewer who usually performs interactively with his installations. No matter the label, Sunset Solitaire exhibits a complex layering of characteristics common in much of McKay’s recent art.

McKay grew up near the City of London, Ontario, and lived and worked in New York for ten years before moving to San Francisco in 2004. His exhibition record includes many solo works as well as collaborations with San Francisco artist Kristin Lucas and Toronto artist Sally McKay, his sister. In his recent work McKay uses computers other equipment as sculptural components and recontextualizes video and game imagery in unexpected ways. A piece of technology might be exploited for purposes other than that for which it was originally designed or because it was badly designed to begin with. In some works, elements of relatively “new” technology—a computer tower, a monitor, or the carriage from a printer—look old and obsolete, rejected and falling apart.

In some of McKay’s recent Kinetic Computer Sculptures, images appear and actions occur peripherally, like in a new untitled work in his studio where a projected figure on a wall is briefly glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye but promptly disappears when one looks back at it. Another kinetic sculpture with the working title Search and Rescue is best described by McKay: “…a computer-driven motor with LED attached is illuminating the insides of an opened Mac tower. A monitor lying on its side displays an image of the computer and light from above, capturing the erratic motion of the motor, as if there was an overhead camera. On the monitor, however, the motor and light rotate faster than the “real” motor inside the computer. This discontinuity is a clue to the fact that there is no camera, and adds to the tension in the piece.” Splayed out on the floor as if unceremoniously—even violently—dumped and forgotten, it’s easy to experience a surprisingly emotional reaction to the traumatized equipment, which is deepened by the subsequent sense of invasive and poorly synchronized surveillance and the viewer’s inability to completely explain what is happening.

Operating at the edges of what we think this consumer technology should and should not do, McKay’s art leads us into the gap between expectation and evidence, challenging the viewer to consider what one sees and how the technology works. But unlike the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, McKay has thrown the curtain away and places the apparatus of his works before us without concealing his tricks.

Joe McKay Big Ups (2005) Site-specific installation at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

The audience’s shared experience of Sunset Solitaire is more passive in comparison to the active audience involvement that is key to much of McKay’s other work. Audio Pong, which McKay calls an “audience participation performance duet,” is a remake of Pong, one of the earliest video games, although McKay’s version is controlled by microphones instead of joysticks; the louder the player talks, the higher their paddle goes. The Color Game engages two players using slider switches who try to match colors projected in increasingly complex patters. Big Ups is a site-specific installation encouraging players to jump on an electronic doormat to propel the image of a ball as high as possible on a TV monitor; one’s reward is a larger and heavier ball. In these works, just as in Sunset Solitaire, interaction and a shared social experience are McKay’s goals. The viewer is engaged not just to see the work, but to also make it happen. Technology is often blamed for the alienation of people from their work and from each other, but McKay employs it as a poetic means to initiate human interaction—with one’s senses and with one another.

For more information on Joe McKay, visit:
http://homepage.mac.com/joester5/art/index.html