We are not alone.
Living all together on this planet, humanity forges relationships with the myriad creatures that share it; together in a home, people cultivate secret intimacies with each other and their objects; together in a body, our splintered selves strive to realize an inspired equilibrium.
In J McDonald’s first international solo show, Cohabitations, he explores what it means to share space. The show marks the creation of an alternative ecosystem of functional sculpture – from geologies and topographies to flora and fauna. The lands and life exhibited here have taken years of evolution and cross pollination to arrive at their current forms, developing complex symbioses and relationships within themselves, amongst each other, and as part of our world. Cohabitations seeks to capture the dynamism of these intersections – each element enriching the voice of the other, amplifying the other’s individuality even while remaining codependent for their form or structure.
All of the works contain two or more distinct elements that intersect, overlap, and interact with each other – giving birth to something that is neither one nor the other, and often even more than the combination of the two. This idea is central to McDonald’s Cube Variations, which has been fleshed out for this show with five new works in the series. In these pieces, a rectilinear element intersects with an organic and sculptural element. The cube is eaten away at or grown out from, its innards exposed and imagined. The cube provides a bounding box of sorts, a habitat within which this infinity of forms and possibilities can dwell. We can think of the cube as an ecosystem, as a home, as a body - but its purity of geometry also suggests that it is a very rational, orderly, very human container. If we consider the cube a symbol of order, then the Variations become a study in how our individual intuitive natures interact with an increasing rational and rectilinear world – of how chaos and order cohabitate within each of us our environments. The other works for Cohabitions explore similar ideas – delving into the fundamental idea of what it means to be a human living in our contemporary world.
Though the relationships between disparate elements forms the main thrust of the work, even these elements alone are composed of a plethora of micro-relationships. Each of us as individuals is an amalgamation of parts - cells, ideas, and impressions -that live together in a single bodily vessel. The material processes used for the pieces in Cohabitations reflect this fractal idea of a whole which is made up of small parts, each of which is in turn made up of smaller parts.
These Cohabitations are fictional analogs to our own earthly ecosystems - but they also cross from analog to reality and become a part of our physical environment, become part of our homes and part of our selves. J McDonald has coaxed them out of the world of his imagination to dwell in this world alongside us, to cohabitate among our kind.
