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- http://marc-anthonymacon.com/
Marc-Anthony Macon
I was raised by a biochemist and a machinist sculptor in a house my dad built in a new neighborhood with only two other houses (and one farm) buried in woods with encroaching suburban sprawl just beyond them. My early years were spent exploring those woods, hopping in trains to see where they took me, assisting my father with his wild and unabashedly kitschy-with-a-rural-mechanic-twist junkyard chic sculptures and odd objects, changing polyacrylamide gels as a lab mascot with my mom, and diving into dumpsters to run home with an assortment of trashy treasures, magazines, books, toys, family photos, and weird ads. I combined these elements and told stories about them in my head and in writing for decades before I thought to simply combine them, physically.
In my mid-forties, after a young adulthood crammed with writing, editing, working for magazines, websites, and children’s and music television networks, I just walked away from it all one day and started ripping apart and gluing my collection of oddities into new beasts, new scenes, and telling their Frankenstein stories visually.
I use mostly found materials, and I let what I find dictate what I make. It’s less about making stories out of disparate elements as it is putting those elements together and seeing what results when their arguments finally reach consensus. Growing up in rural Ohio, I was raised with a staunch aversion to pomposity, and no small part of my art practice is in service of lampooning hauteur. Whatever is considered “low” or “pedestrian” in art circles, that’s where I wanna hang out. To that end, I love little more than seeing a snob’s nose wrinkle when I tell them I print up portraits of folks and paint right over their faces with some stickers and such mixed in to make, well, portraits of them.
My work is unabashedly queer and outré, but it’s heavily seasoned with child-like humor and playfulness. There’s an awful glut of art that takes itself too seriously, so for the sake of balance, I want to make art that takes itself too ridiculously. I mean it. This is ridiculous business.
I’m super fond of puzzles, and my work is an ongoing and expanding kaleidoscope of a puzzle: If you look at one piece, you’re likely to see a mess. If you look at ten pieces, you might start to wonder who’s responsible for this mess, and how you might cajole them into cleaning up after themselves. If you look at a hundred pieces, you might start to find little clues carefully hidden in the clutter that seem indicative of a beautiful structure that this ostensible junkyard will align to form, if you can find just the right angle and distance from which to view it. It’s not a story bound in time or place or politics or polite society, but it’s a story all right, and while I may coyly shy away from pointing out the official standing spot for seeing the story unfold from its outset to its latest episode, each scene has at least one hint to its location.
My work has been exhibited domestically and internationally, including at the Art Museum Versi in South Korea for their group exhibitions, Art the People Lust For (2017) and Who Is the Outsider? (2021-2022), and at Art Space Brut’s Danger and Humour, as well as private home bathrooms everywhere.
