Sara MacKillop’s practice can be read as an exploration of paper and its capacity to support and transmit information. Her works often come about through encounters with common objects, images, and structures that take on a wider set of associations when taken out of their typical context.
Office supplies, stationery, and paper are freed from their intended functions. They are no longer made to inhabit the laborious realm of commerce and productivity, but instead, are given the choice of leisure. They are allowed to unfurl, loosen or lay dormant.Every single work in this exhibition is oriented vertically. The artworks run parallel to one another. Thesauruses and furniture catalogues have been equipped with handles and now hang on walls patiently, anticipating some kind of imminent use as reading material. Rolls of paper act as a barrier, a bollard and a curtain as they divide the space into lanes leaving behind their cylindrical forms as they unravel.
Objects display their intended form while being able to unfurl to the limits of the forces acting upon them. These two function groups of “rolled” and “handled” illustrate two continuums of activity and passivity in regards to a person’s interaction with the object. A paper cannot physically be folded symmetrically more than eight times while rolling paper can seemingly be done infinitely and efficiently.
The exhibition’s title, Meanwhile…, brings to mind the cliche intertitle from cartoons and silent films while also alluding to this transfer of associations and form in the artist’s practice. The exhibition features a blend of new as well as reworked gestures in which each aspect performs simultaneous functions. “Meanwhile back at the ranch” was the name that Alfred Hitchcock gave to a piece of storytelling advice that he gave to filmmakers, whereby you structure the story as two parallel storylines, and cut from the first to the second just as the first reaches its peak.
