Awagami Paper Award Winner
Vicious Cycle, 2018
Video, 7m 41s
K MacNeil (born 1989, Asheville, NC; lives Buffalo, NY) holds a BA in Studio Art from the College of Charleston and an MFA in Studio Art from SUNY Buffalo. Their work has been exhibited at Big Medium, Austin, TX; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Print Matters Houston; and International Print Center New York; as well as Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. They have been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson and are scheduled to attend the Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA in 2020. MacNeil teaches printmaking and drawing courses at SUNY Buffalo and is currently Studio Manager and Curator at the Western New York Book Arts Center.
Statement from the Artist:
Vicious Cycle is a performance-based video that explores the boundaries of personal identity as one marked by traumatic experiences. By allowing the viewer to watch an internal struggle made corporeal, the work situates the viewer in the role of witness – unable to stop or intervene in this endless cycle. In this video, I have placed two large (48” x 36”) pieces of copper on easels: one sheet is completely black, covered in printmaking ink, and the other is completely bare, an unmarred/unmarked reflective surface. In addition to this video, there are two prints resulting from these copper plates which serve as indexes/residue to the performance. These prints were produced and showcased as a way of giving the viewer a close look at the details of the performance, and further solidifying the dual-nature of this work.
Untitled (the Void) consists of a series of prints all derived from a single copper etching plate. The plate was 18″ x 24″ and received numerous layers of aquatint, along with numerous reductive processes. The result was over 100 proofs that evolved into the two panels above, along with an abstract animation documenting the entire process.
A Closer Look at Untitled (the Void), 2016
K MacNeil’s work explores the realities of life with a mental illness. Untitled (the Void) takes its title from a quotation by the Italian writer Italo Calvino: “To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means.” MacNeil manifests this void through constructing a grid-like structure of twenty five 18” x 24” etchings pulled from a single copper plate. Each represents a year in their life at the time of production. By altering the plate between pulls, MacNeil creates a work in which the process and final product are intertwined.