Grant McFarland
January 5-28, 2018
Residuals
This work was born while spending some time on the New York/ Vermont border. Its rural up there, it takes 40 minutes to get anywhere. Farm country, slate country, and like much of America far less industry than 25 years ago. The remnants of what once was are on full display. Abandoned mines, barns, small factories. The relationship with resources in the country is remarkably direct. Grow, harvest, cut, mine, mill, seed. Wood to heat, fields for food. There is an odd mixture of reliance on and disregard for the land that I think comes from having so much of it. To be clear, people in the country are not more disrespectful of the earth than their urban counterparts, almost always the opposite. But the transgressions are much more stark in the midst of so much seemingly uninhibited natural beauty. Just beneath the patina of greenery lies a plethora of individual reminders that humans have twisted and forced the land to do just what we want, as best we can, for as long as we can.
These sculptures are made from the leftovers of this place; they are portraits of the impact of our industry on the land. In their assembly they become more than trash; they reflect our interaction with the land and our consumption of resources. They are the remains that mark the passage of our time. They relate to specific labors we undertake and execute with some sense of purpose and necessity. A quantification of that interaction changing. When we use firewood and stone, we think of their immediate use, nothing more. We neglect to acknowledge the age and scope of material beyond our purposes. We disavow its history, leave our marks etched indelibly upon the land. These piles and scars we build and carve may be all that remains of our endeavors, until they too disappear. Our conception of time is so stilted and narrow, and yet it is all we have.
Grant McFarland is a Maryland born, Washington DC-based sculptor who graduated from University of Maryland in 2016 with a BA in studio art. He participated in the UMD Art Honors program and recently worked as a resident artist at Salem Art Works in Salem, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Salem Art Works, 39th Street Gallery in Hyattsville, Maryland, Sandy Spring Museum in Olney, Maryland, Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, Maryland, and McClean Project for the Arts in McClean, Virginia, among others. His current work is concerned with resource use, post-industrial tendencies and human-environmental interactions.
