Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment

Upper Level Galleries

February 07, 2004 — May 09, 2004

Offering a mid-career survey of Seattle-based artist Roy McMakin, A Door Meant as Adornment traced the development of his career in art, design, and architecture. Meaningful and poetic interconnections between the words ‘adore,’ ‘adornment,’ ‘ornament,’ and ‘door’ made them ripe for McMakin’s playful sensibility, allowing him to link diverse concepts and to prime viewers for some of the ways boundaries between the traditional definitions of furniture blur in his work.

Trained as a painter, McMakin became a strong presence in the design world when he founded the Domestic Furniture Company in 1987. Completing a furniture design commission for the Getty in 1994, he reentered the art world with sculptures that referred to the domestic realm and complicated the line between utilitarian function and pure aesthetic form. His work over the prior decade encompassed aspects of the built environment — sculpture and installations that engaged issues of domesticity, memory, and the ecology of materials, as well as more purely functional objects that nonetheless consider critically the ways bodies interact with space.

ARTISTS

Roy McMakin

CREDITS

Curated by Elizabeth Brown & Pamela Meredith.

The exhibition is sponsored by House & Garden. Additional support has been provided by The Ron Burkle Endowment for Architecture and Design Programs, the Pacific Design Center, Audrey M. Irmas, and Heidi and Erik Murkoff. In-kind support has been provided by Electrolux Home Products and Fine Paints of Europe. The exhibition is organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Chief Curator Elizabeth A. Brown and Assistant Curator Pamela Meredith and presented at the Henry with the generous support of The Allen Foundation, PONCHO, The Casteel Family Foundation, William and Ruth True, Patricia True, Jane Hedreen and David Thyer, Mrs. Janet W. Ketcham, the Henry Art Gallery Contemporary Art Fund and an anonymous donor. In-kind support for this exhibition has been provided by the Home Depot, Maharam and KEXP 90.3 FM.

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Curated by Michael Darling.