D ir e c tor ’s For ewor d
Graham McDougal: Screen Time, represents a chance to view his wonderful work. From a wide variety of sources and research Graham McDougal creates compelling images that takes us to places we are not sure of but at the same time remain familiar to our being. As a photographer, printmaker, and painter it is amazing to see how he uses his chosen medias to examine how change can affect objects, spaces, and contexts. McDougal is also a colleague from UC Davis where he is an Assistant Professor of Art. I am very excited to be able to exhibit Graham’s work for others to enjoy. I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Graham McDougal for the chance of exhibiting his brilliant work, A.Will Brown for their insightful essay, the College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design and Parks Printing for the printing this catalog. Much gratitude is extended to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.
Dean De Cocker, Gallery Director California State University, Stanislaus
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G r ah am M c D o u gal
Ar tist Statement My work begins with the printed page, which I consider to be a site and source for research.This involves photographing and scanning rare books, print ephemera and essays on art, typography and architectural design. I choose pages that reference automation within modern industrial systems; the demise of labor and craft through technological advances in print production from hand-set type to digital-printing. Radical changes in the means of production alter the function and intention of objects; wartime aircraft factories, re-tooled for the peacetime provision of housing. Similarly, the distortion purposefully introduced during the digital reproduction begins to alter their function and intent. This influences the visual form of the work integrating analog forms of collage, drawing and painting with mechanical forms of photography and screen-printing.
Special Thanks Thank you to students, faculty and staff at CSUS for their assistance in realizing this exhibition. To Martin Azevedo and Dean De Cocker for the invitation and to Megan Hennes, Brad Peatross and Jon Kithcart for their technical assistance. Thanks to A. Will Brown for reflecting upon the work and writing the essay for this catalog and special thanks to Elizabeth Corkery for her critique and enthusiasm.
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Alu miniu m Po e tr y : Pa r t Two (ə- lōō’ m ə - n ə m ) — a · l u · m i·n u m — al u m i n u m In 1825 the Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted produced the first sample of aluminum. Once an exorbitantly expensive material due to the difficulty involved in extracting it from ore—valued at $1,200 a kilogram in 1852— ironically, aluminum represents over 8% of the earth’s crust, making it the most plentiful elemental metal embedded in the planet. These two contributing factors made aluminum a rare material that was scarcely used in industrial production until the early 20th century—in time aluminum’s value dropped significantly to $0.60 per kilogram in 1909 due to the invention of advanced extraction techniques. Nearly forty years later, and at the tail-end of World War II, the British government formed the Aircraft Industries Research Organization on Housing (Airoh) to investigate a potential widespread use of aluminum to solve burgeoning domestic labor and housing shortages. Airoh—and its initiatives—was a result of the newfound ease of producing aluminum and the rise and dominance of airpower that emerged during the later years of WWII. Airplanes were easier, faster, and cheaper to produce in the late 1930s and early 1940s due to advances in machining and aluminum extraction technology, and the Axis forces simply couldn’t keep-up. The Allied forces superior airpower and ability to launch planes from strategic points in Europe and from a fleet of Aircraft Carriers throughout the Pacific was central to ending the war. In turn though, the end of the war left a glut of ready-to-use aluminum, as well as a readymade production infrastructure and labor force prepared to translate the material into any number of forms. Out of necessity and shrewdness, Airoh developed and published The First Factory-Made Aluminum Bungalow program and an accompanying booklet, which detailed a series of prefabricated temporary housing units made from aluminum. The booklet was banal, and it detailed the transformation of aluminum from a complex wartime industrial material into a simplified form of prefabricated domesticity; as such it functioned as both a proposal and a justification for the implementation of the government’s program for inexpensive, mass-produced, and easily assembled—and disassembled—homes configured from the remnants of a wartime industry. The banality was deceptive—insidious even—as it made the replacement of the skilled labor employed in housing production with that of simple prefabrication and rote assembly seem like an exciting and inevitable matter-of-fact. Like many advances in technology and manufacturing this change was framed as the inevitable solution, not as one of many possibilities. Beginning with the presentation of Graham McDougal’s work at Regina Rex, On the façade: Graham McDougal – Aluminum Poetry in 2016, the artist has been making a body of work conceptually related to The First Factory-Made Aluminum Bungalow program and booklet, exploring the shifts in production and labor that this new program catalyzed. Through the lenses of photographer, printmaker, and painter McDougal uses his chosen media to explore how changes in industrial production and application profoundly affect objects, spaces, and contexts. Like many elements and materials—gold, silver, oil, and natural gas—the shift in aluminum’s grade from rare and costly to readily available and inexpensive was governed by a series of economic and technological changes. However, while each material’s utility and value is transformed by social structures, this is not alchemy and the material itself never truly changes. Uncovering distinctions like these and telling the story of aluminum in this case, is at the heart of McDougal’s practice and is essential to understanding the works on view in Screen Time. More specifically the artist is interested
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in how industrial systems and technological advances alter, and at times replace human labor and eliminate traces of it altogether such as the erasure of the mark of the hand in digital printing and production processes—changes that inevitably transform objects and their creators fundamentally. In the booklet, Airoh goes so far as to provide illustrations of the various prefabricated components used to construct the small aluminum houses.The aluminum building sections is in the booklet look more like typographic symbols or letters from a written language than they do parts of a building. It is the renderings of these forms—roof, walls, and floor components—that appear to be extruding out from the picture plane into real space, which the artist incorporates into his own formal lexicon. The group of new prints on panel made for Screen Time grew out of the artist’s 2016 Regina Rex presentation by continuing to use the prefabricated aluminum bungalow components as formal elements within the picture plane. The five Interior (2019) prints depict interior spaces the artist photographed in London, Los Angeles, and New York, and are titled accordingly—London Interior, Los Angeles Interior, or New York Interior. Within each space McDougal places furniture-like abstract objects that are derived from the aluminum bungalow components. For both the 2016 exhibition and Screen Time the artist also includes a screen-printed diagram of the aluminum components—a key to read his Interiors—as they are shown in the Airoh booklet, all in one picture plane like a poster of the letters in an alphabet. Like the furniture elements in the Interior works the forms in the diagram are printed in halftones and multiple colors to render them in greater detail than their background settings, which are printed in a single flattening hue that pushes the objects into the foreground. The final layer to this body of work is found in the mesmeric surfaces of the furniture-like objects. On view along with the Interiors is a group of abstract paintings that the artist uses to complete the circuit he’s built in this project. Onto the surfaces of each furniture-like-object McDougal applies motifs directly from the group of the paintings, as though giving each object a new skin. In essence his paintings become his own source material, yet also remain simply paintings. McDougal’s work asks us to consider what changes when an object, surface, or a space undergoes a shift in physical and conceptual orientation. Perhaps nothing, or, maybe everything; this is an idea that Professor Graham Harman offers in his book Add Metaphysics at the end of his essay Undermining, Overmining, and Duomining: A Critique, which sets into motion many of the same ideas McDougal has been working with over the last few years: “The Purpose of the assignment is to reinforce the sense that objects are independent both of their constituent pieces and their effects on exterior things.” The transformation of a key piece of wartime infrastructure—aluminum—from explosive delivery device into affordable peacetime housing should neither go unnoticed nor be readily embraced without analysis, just as the self-referential nature of McDougal’s work asks to be interrogated. Amongst the most poignant questions in Harman’s assignment to McDougal’s investigation of form and representation are these: “How could we rebuild this object using different materials or components? What is the greatest number of changes we could make while still having the object remain roughly the same thing? What is the smallest change we could make that would destroy the object or turn it into something else altogether?” Does living in an aluminum bungalow implicate one in the British wartime industry and the war effort? 9
Answering these elliptical questions isn’t quite the aim for McDougal as he is more interested in enacting parallel possibilities through the very act of artmaking. One could say that here, in Screen Time the artist has built his very own prefabricated prints, which ascribe specific representational meaning to the spaces they depict. By bringing together the motifs from his paintings and using them as ready-made surfaces for the pre-existing aluminum bungalow components, which are presented as banal utilitarian pieces of furniture or architectural design elements, McDougal has mirrored Airoh’s aims and eventual results to explore the very structure of a potential visual language of surfaces, colors, extrusions, and translations. Knowing where materials and objects come from is important, and art seems a fitting arena to reveal the slight-of-hand that nations and corporations use to solve their self-made domestic problems through—what are at times most certainly—questionable methods.
A. Will Brown Assistant Curator, MoCA Cleveland
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https://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html
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http://www.bbc.co.uk /history/worldwars/wwtwo/how_the_allies_won_01.shtml
Sutela, Jenna. Add Metaphysics. Aalto University, 2013. Pg. 50-51: 1. The independent reality of a thing is appreciated if we imagine it inhabiting other situations or having other effects than it currently does. These are known as “counterfactuals.” 2. The independent reality of a thing is also appreciated if we imagine that it were composed of different elements. Coining a new term we can call these “countercompositionals.” The assignment is to explore both counterfactuals and countercompositionals for any given object in order to better appreciate the autonomous reality of those objects. Step 1: Each student is given a slip of paper, and writes the name of an object—a person, an animal, a thing, a fictional character, a corporation—indeed, anything at all. The slips of paper are then put into a container. Step 2: each student draws one of the slips of paper and must work with the object inscribed. Step 3: The student should determine the counterfactuals for this object. Star t by asking: In what situation do we usually find tis object? Then, the student should imagine other possible situations for the object, star ting simply and working toward more and more imaginative scenarios. What surprises result from this exercise? Is this object capable of things that we never realized? How would the world need to change in order for this object to acquire greater or lesser impact than it currently has? Step 4: The student should now determine the countercompositionals for the object. How could we rebuild this object using different materials or components? What is the greatest number is of changes we could make while still having the object remain roughly the same thing? What is the smallest change we could make that would destroy the object or turn it into something else altogether? Step 5: Students should now discuss all of their results together. Are any of the results especially funny? Especially surprising? Especially frightening?
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Ibid.
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G r a ha m M cD oug a l EDUCATION 1998–2001 MFA, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 1995–98 BA (hons.) Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Scotland, UK 1994–95 BTECH, Foundation Studies, Cumbria College of Art and Design, Carlisle, England, UK AWARDS & RESIDENCIES 2015 2014 2010 2006 1998
Residency at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA Residency at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock NY LCC Individual Artist Fellowship, Somerville Arts Council, MA NYFA S.O.S, (Individual Artists Grant) New York Foundation for the Arts Cornell Council for the Arts (Individual Artists Grant) Scottish International Education Trust
EXHIBITIONS 2017–18 Dialog on Distortion Graham McDougal and Bayne Peterson, Providence College-Galleries, Providence, RI 2016–17 Graham McDougal - Aluminum Poetry, Regina Rex, New York, NY 2014 the Modern Interior Graham McDougal / Elizabeth Corkery, First Draft, Sydney, Australia 2012 Graham McDougal, Baron Gallery, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH Graham McDougal, Milstein Gallery and Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 2010 Graham McDougal & Anthony Graves, Gallery St. Vitus, London, UK GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 New Flowers (woodcut), edition for Print Club Ltd. Editions and Artists Book Fair, New York, NY 2017 Angle, Pitch. curated by Amie Cunat, Outside Gallery, North Adams, MA 2016 [Old/New] Psychedelic Providence, curated by Jamilee Lacy, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago, IL 2015 Bag Wash – Graham McDougal, Dan Arps, Ash Kilmartin, Mitchel Cumming, KNULP, Sydney, Australia 2014 SP Weather Reports (2008-2013), curated by Natalie Campbell, Center for Book Arts in New York, NY 2013 Published by the Artist, International Print Center, New York, NY 2011 Signs on the Road, curated by Workroom General, Curatorial Research Lab at Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY 2009 83rd Annual International Competition, curated by Peter Nesbett and Shelly Bancroft, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA 2007 Literature Rack, curated by Natalie Campbell, Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY ITER-ITER-ATION - Literature Rack, curated by Natalie Campbell, Nurtureart, Brooklyn, NY 2004 Pages, curated by Buzz Spector, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY Double Take, curated by Pavel Zoubok, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY 2002 Reset: Media Arts Festival, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, in association with the Kracow Academy of Fine Arts and the Goethe Institute, Kracow, Poland 2001 Stare: Photographic Survey, curated by Trudy Wilner-Stack, MCA, Mesa, AZ TEACHING 2017– Assistant Professor of Art, UC Davis, Davis, CA 2016–17 Professor of the Practice, Print + Paper and Graphic Arts, SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, MA 2013–16 Faculty, Print + Paper and Graphic Arts, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 2012–13 Visiting Assistant Professor of Reproducible Media and Studio Art, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 2004–12 Lecturer, Department of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
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IMAGE LIST Cover
New York Interior, (detail), acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x22“, 2019
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Street View of Regina Rex, 221 Madison Street, NY, NY, 2016
Pages 4–5 Pages 18 & 15 from The First Factory Made Aluminium Bungalow, the Aluminium Development Association, London, 1948 Page 9
Aluminum Poetry, (installation view), hand-painted, vacuum-formed sign, 35.5 x 47.25”, 2016
Page 10–13 Aluminum Poetry, (installation view), light boxes, cortex, vinyl, vacuum-formed signs and acrylic paint, light boxes, 120 x 110” marquee, 35.5 x 47.25”, 2016 Page 12–13 Aluminum Poetry, (installation view), light boxes, cortex, vinyl, vacuum-formed signs and acrylic paint, light boxes,120 x 110” marquee, 35.5 x 47.25”, 2016 Page 14
Los Angeles Interior, (detail), acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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Aluminium Sections 3, acrylic and screen print on panel, 22 x 17”, 2019
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Covering 5, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Covering 6, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Covering 7, acrylic and screen print on cotton, mounted to panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Los Angeles Interior 2, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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London Interior 2, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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Covering 11, (detail) acrylic and screen print on woodcut mounted to panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Covering 10, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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London Interior, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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Los Angeles Interior, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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Covering 9, (detail), acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Covering 4, crayon, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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New York Interior, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 22”, 2019
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Covering 8, acrylic and screen print on cotton, mounted to panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Covering 9, acrylic and screen print on panel, 17 x 11”, 2018
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Ackn ow le dge m en ts
California State University, Stanislaus
Dr. Ellen Junn, President
Dr. Kimberly Greer, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs
Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Depar tment of Ar t
Dr. Carmen Robbin, Chair, Professor
Dean De Cocker, Professor
Martin Azevedo, Assistant Professor
Tricia Cooper, Lecturer
James Deitz, Lecturer
Daniel Edwards, Associate Professor
Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor
Daniel Heskamp, Lecturer
Chad Hunter, Lecturer
David Olivant, Professor
Patrica Eshagh, Lecturer
Ellen Roehne, Lecturer
Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Associate Professor
Susan Stephenson, Assistant Professor
Jake Weigel, Assistant Professor
Meg Broderick, Administrative Support Assistant II
Andrew Cain, Instructional Technician I
Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II
University Ar t Galler y
Dean De Cocker, Director
Megan Hennes, Gallery Assistant
School of the Ar ts
Brad Peatross, Graphic Specialist II
Graham McDougal - Screen Time March 25–April 19, 2019 | University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus | One University circle, Turlock, CA 95382 300 copies printed. Copyright © 2019 California State University, Stanislaus • ISBN: 978-1-940753-42-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. This exhibition and catalog have been funded by Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus.
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