Jo McGonigal and Mary Maclean

About

Mary Maclean’s work in photography explores the intersections of spatial thought and the flux of things that are always on the move, even if captured in the apparently implacable, static, objecthood of the image. She is founder member of the curating group Outside Architecture and was a member of the collaborative artists project Five Years 2010 -2015. She is currently Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools.

Jo McGonigal  makes spatial paintings out of physical things in real space. The work begins with a visual analysis of historical Baroque painting (e.g. Poussin, Vermeer, etc.) as a basis for understanding painting, not as a fixed identity but as a specific spatial construction with a pictorial and spatial vocabulary. These observations became translated through the construction of three-dimensional spatial paintings as pictorial compositions that reconfigure the space and its architecture, using specific physical things. The exhibition space evolves the work through its spatial characteristics.  In using materials to imply formal and conceptual qualities of transparency, light, opacity, verticality, proximity, distance, McGonigal is dealing with in how they are used a vernacular of painting.