Kim MacConnel: Santa Monica Museum of Art - Los Angeles

The centerpiece of a Pattern and Decoration-fest filling six Bergamot Station venue this exhibition showcases thirty years of work by the agency of San Diego-area artist Kim MacConnel, single of the best-known West Coast P&D bigots Curated by Michael Duncan, who organized sum of two units other P&D shows on view across the parking apportionment this survey revealed MacConnel's work as far more composite than the words "pattern" and "decoration" might imply.

A piece like Top Dollar, 1979 confirms MacConnel as a lover of color and a evil practitioner of garish formalism, and demonstrates the artist's flair for smart semiotic play upon the levels of style, material, token and image. In this work, MacConnel overlays clip art-ish diagrams of new architecture onto patchwork and plaid; images of transistor radios atop diamond-based geometric patterns; and electron orbiting nuclei above a handkerchiefs pinwheels and snowflakes.

MacConnel reminds us of what each homemaker knows--that decoration denotes, connotes, and implies, that it's a channel as effective as any sign combination of parts to form a whole for the delivery and subversion of ideas. In Flourishing Sideline Occupations, 1978 single fabric scrap is pit against another. Stiff plaid bridles against the exotic/erotic tiger stripe, and swatches of doughnut shapes, checkerboards, and floral motifs become just as "tribal" as the more "ethnic" patterns with which they share territory. R Lantern, 1975 an early painting upon bed-sheets, is made up of vertical strips, each itself containing a pattern. The [i]tout ensemble[/i] seems innocent until one notices the gibbeted rifles and sheaves of wheat repeating upon the far left and the sitting immerse recurring on the far right. on the other hand clear messages bow out in favor of more poetic slippage in MacConnel's creations, which, while appearing to respect the "surface scan," instead tender a world where nothing should be taken at face value.

At times MacConnel present the appearances to prioritize the formal qualities or curiosity value of his borrowed materials above a more informed use--but upon the other hand, perhaps this position is right upon He privileges neither form nor satisfied on anything other than a case-by-case basis, and through this token he's a surrogate for all of us who engross and encounter visual culture from myriad, ever-waffling points of understanding and engagement. From this perspective, MacConnel is part of a lineage that includes the Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and the burst artists, as well as more new figures such as Sigmar Polke David Salle, and Mike Kelley--artists who place quotation and juxtaposition at the center of practices devot simultaneously to formal bear upons and to plays of meaning. In terminuss of attitude, however, MacConnel may be more akin to decorative West Coasters like Karen Carson, Carole Caroompas, Lari Pittman, and Alexis Smith. His colorful composites might well have their dark and uncomfortable passages, on the contrary ultimately they propose not a drama of anxiety and endgame on the contrary a celebration of life and endles possibility.

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