Angus McCullough - Friendmaking

About

SomoS is proud to present the solo exhibition Friendmaking by current Artist-in-Residence, multidisciplinary artist Angus McCullough (NY.)

McCullough uses art as an investigative tool to explore existential and civilizational questions in a personal way. In a very open way of artmaking, that goes beyond academic confines and integrates all of life, his techniques may range from video works, writing, assemblage, music, performance, curating, architecture, to spiritual techniques such as lucid dreaming. “Perhaps what is most striking about Angus’ art is the way he embraces traditional skills to explore ideas that are both exciting and current,” Michelle Aldredge noted in Gwarlingo Magazine.

The works presented in Friendmaking are part of an ongoing series of anthropomorphic interactive sculptures and installations, titled Temporaries, that move, and produce sound, seeming to communicate with the audience. In his work process, materials brought by the artist from the US meet and converse with material sourced in Berlin. The resulting works express McCullough’s deeply felt and considered philosophical and conceptual approach, that explores the an animistic experience of the world that furthers a spiritual sense of respect and connection to our surroundings.

In his exhibition, McCullough ponders whether there is a threshold where matter moves beyond the sum of its parts, and becomes a being, stating “Can we trace our selfhood back to the chemical and structural interactions that produce a body, or -on a deeper level- our presence?” In Friendmaking, he asks these questions of wood, steel, plastic, paper, candles, inkjet prints, wire, foam, text, speakers, stones, screens, fabric, incense, sound, and, sometimes, visitors. They are considered as a set of participants that gain meaning through relation to one another. In a world suffocating with useless objects, McCullough believes that by contemplating the nature of matter and its interactions, we might find deeper ways to connect the natural and constructed world.

It is in the magical spark of material and intellectual conversation, the transcending merging of disparate parts, of establishing relationships, this alchemical “making of friends” that McCullough’s installations offers a contemporary interpretation of an age old concern of literature, religion and magic: the moment of “Beseelung,” of animation, that constitutes life, as well as the creation of a work of art, that strange embodied object of our fascination.