November 14 – January 16, 2016

Opening reception: Saturday, November 14, 6–8 pm

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce a project-room exhibition of new drawings by Roy McMakin. This is the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery.

Roy McMakin designs buildings and furniture; he makes sculptures, paintings, and drawings. The drawings in this show—part of an ongoing series—blur boundaries between art/design/architecture and functionality/uselessness, as does all of his work.

Some of them look like the technical drawings McMakin gives to fabricators—plans for furniture or sculptures.

Others just seem to be beautiful drawings, unambiguously meant to hang on a wall or put on a dresser. The content of these drawings, however, sometimes overlaps with the sketches that look like blueprints—thereby confusing the purpose and utility of all the drawings.

Issues of utility have long been central to McMakin’s practice. When is a chair just a chair? When is it something more? McMakin is interested in domestic objects and spaces—chests of drawers, juice glasses, tables, doors, potted plants, windows—and their specific histories, personalities, and physical and emotional effects on the people who use them.

Drawing lies at the core of McMakin’s practice; pencil on paper is the purest way for him to communicate ideas, instructions, memories, or feelings.

Roy McMakin, born in 1956 in Wyoming, lives and works in San Diego. McMakin has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Artpace (San Antonio), Aldrich Contemporary (Connecticut), and Western Bridge (Seattle). He has participated in shows at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla), Tacoma Art Museum, and Vancouver Art Gallery. He has produced commissioned work for the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle), and San Diego International Airport. His drawings are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York).