Kathleen McCarthy at Standard and Patrick McGee at the Hyde Park Art Center - Chicago

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Susan Snodgrass

Two recent installations, one by Kathleen McCarthy, the other by Patrick McGee, similarly tested the boundaries of materiality and perception. Utilizing humble strands of nylon monofilament and polyester cord, respectively, each artist created a subtle, site-specific intervention that engaged the viewer in the bodily and metaphysical experiences of space.

In both works, three-dimensional mass was reduced to a series of suspended lines. The tautly pulled vertical zips of monofilament, or fishing line, comprising McCarthy's poetic Intersect at Standard formed a three-sided curtain (approximately 12 feet high, 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep) that echoed the rectangular geometry of this small storefront space. One entered the work unawares, simply by entering the gallery, as the transparent nature of the artist's medium made the installation nearly invisible at first. The work soon materialized, however--a series of monofilament "panels" made of hundreds of vertical strands strung parallel to one another in a squared-off plane that ran around three sides of the room, shower-curtain-style, with optical plays of natural and artificial light that cast shadows and radiant patterns of warm yellow and white. Placed at measured intervals, these "panels" of monofilament were interrupted by several gaps, allowing the viewer to move inside and outside the work.

Acting somewhat the way a Miesian glass curtain wall does, Intersect dissolved the visual divide between interior and exterior space, creating a tranquil, Zen-like atmosphere in which to pause or contemplate. Despite the interdependent relationship established with its surroundings, Intersect had a presence all its own.

Buckminster Fuller, who, like Mies, applied utopian principles to modern architecture, was the influence for McGee's U7 at the Hyde Park Art Center. The title is the mathematical notation for a cuboctahedron, a truncated cube whose outer surface consists of eight triangular faces and six square ones. Termed a "vector equilibrium" by Fuller because of its structural stability, the cuboctahedron is often used in manufacturing and industry.

McGee translated this stable, volumetric form into a seemingly weightless dome or canopy constructed from a network of polyester cords attached to the gallery's ceiling and walls. Viewed either from below (from the gallery floor) or above (from the second-floor balcony), U7, like McCarthy's piece, slowly came into focus with extended viewing, nudged into legibility through the use of bright orange fluorescent paint applied to some of the cords. The painted strands outlined the cuboctahedron itself; those left white functioned mainly as a support system. Additionally, a flattened version of the same polyhedron was outlined in brown tape on the gallery floor.

While McGee is interested in geometry and mathematical analysis of form, his goal here was not solely to represent a spatial concept. Equally at issue was the relationship of the delineated form to the architectural space surrounding it. The Art Center's 2,600-square-foot Beaux-Arts interior, once a ballroom, contended instructively with the work's minimalistic esthetic, creating an enlivening tension that charged the space.

The strengths of Intersect and U7 lay in the way they defied the conventions of vantage point and visualization, enlisting the viewer's imagination to bring the works' formal properties into play. Thus, themes of placement and displacement, openness and entrapment, emptiness and volume, materiality and immateriality together became the means by which one physically and cognitively entered each work. Sharing certain affinities with artists such as Fred Sandback and, to some extent, Daniel Buren, both McCarthy and McGee have been creating installations with their respective mediums for quite some time. Yet their work remains protean, refreshed by each new iteration.