Sarah McKenzie

Gallery Affiliations: Jen Bekman Gallery

Region: West

Website: http://www.sarahmckenzie.com

City / State: Boulder, CO

My current body of work, White Walls, explores the architecture of the exhibition space—minimalist gallery and museum interiors, art fair tents, and video-screening rooms. I am interested in the notion of spectacle and the role that architecture plays in orienting the viewer’s experience of a work of art. The spaces featured in my paintings are vessels designed to accommodate an ever-shifting range of aesthetic experiences. These rooms are simultaneously austere and luxurious, impersonal and sacred. They may appear makeshift, but are in fact highly controlled and culturally coded, raising issues of audience and access. As with all my work, human occupants are notably absent from the paintings, forcing the viewer to consider his or her own position with respect to the scenes depicted.