MOCA Pacific Design Center
Though trained as an artist, Roy McMakin always intended to pursue both art-making and furniture design, plumbing the intersections and divergences between each aesthetic category. Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment surveys both aspects of the Seattle-based artist’s practice, distinguishing the two as such: art creates problems to inspire thought; design finds practical solutions to existing ones. Yet these boundaries are porous, as suggested by the exhibition title, in which a functional design object is recast as purely aesthetic. Lequita Faye Melvin (2003), an installation of over 30 domestic furniture objects identically painted gray, is an example of this thematic slippage between art and design. Actual design pieces in the exhibition, such as Maple Chest (1990), subvert their own conventionality with mismatched proportions, displaced drawer handles, and modified supports. McMakin additionally created a new outdoor sculpture for the show, called SET/SEAT (2003), which combined word play with functional seating.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment is organized by Michael Darling for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.