Charles McGee/Al Hinton
Marygrove
October 19 through November 14, 2006

Your arts editor wrote the essay for McGee for this one, and so no review. See a past review of this duo here, and I've included the current essay below. (More on McGee, please click here.)

Also, McGee recently installed a piece at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit to great enthusiasm. Here's a shot of McGee and helpers in action!

“What’s next Charles?”

This question drives Charles McGee’s continual quest for greater understanding through visual media. It keeps him hard at work seeking answers in the studio and restless to get back to work when he’s away. In his 82nd year, we might say he’s entitled to slow down a bit, but McGee’s never content, never ceases to be inventive, and is always figuring out the new best way for expression.

He expresses his admiration for the French artist Jean Dubuffet, specifically for, “the way in which he always changed without asking.” Of course, this could describe McGee as well, as his work is always about change and constantly changing over time. He loosed his strict adherence to representational work, which had brought him much early recognition, as he saw the expanded expressive possibilities that abstraction provided. Materials change too, and he continues to add tools to his arsenal from charcoal to aluminum to neon, and now, the computer!

This continual process of change is never simply change for change’s sake, rather a deep belief that the work must speak the language of the time and the environment in which it’s created. And what an amazing amount of change he’s witnessed in his lifetime! Born in a place and time without electricity, and now in a time where everything is wired and we’re even learning to rewire our DNA, McGee’s embraced what can be learned from this ever changing landscape and dives in with boundless energy. Each new vista is another morsel of information, a new tool for expression and understanding “nature’s order.”

Even with this process of continual change, McGee’s work is instantly identifiable and uniquely his, like the distinct pattern of whorls on a fingerprint or a person’s particular DNA. His signature is written in composition. His training as a cartographer shines through; these are maps weaving together multiple layers of experience within a single composition. The work is an extension of experience, not autobiographical in the literal sense, but that one’s experiences and perspective are necessarily incorporated into the composition. McGee’s signature is an integration of past works, cloth, dirt, anything he’s laid eyes upon or put his hands on is material. Alive with pattern and rhythm, where human figures mingle with protozoa, his compositions are efforts to best energize space, celebratory dances with necessary rests – a map of life.

Upon his arrival in Detroit from the rural South at the age of 10, McGee was fascinated and transformed by the overwhelming display of kinetic movement and activity. That sense of continual wonder persists today, as he remains just as excited and amazed as that first time, and that energy and perspective is always a part of his artwork. As he says, “Everything is on the move and it hasn’t slowed down yet.”

Neither have you Charles, and we can’t wait to see “what’s next?” from you either.

– Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com