Kim MacConnel at Thomas Solomon's Garage and Quint - Los Angeles and San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions

From bits of plastic trash washed up on the beach, Kim MacConnel has been making a seemingly endless series of assemblage-style clown sculptures, ranging from 8 inches to 2 feet in height. With its eye-grabbing commercial palette and hard-candy texture, plastic rubble provides a perfect medium for MacConnel. He titled the Solomon show "The Age of Plastic," comically referring to the Guggenheim's 1993 sculpture exhibition "The Age of Iron." Like that show's modernist figurative works by Picasso, Calder and Julio Gonzalez, MacConnel's clowns are both formally rigorous and playful, yet their lowly medium heads off any possibility of pretentiousness.

The sheer number of clowns (28 in the tiny Quint gallery, 57 at Solomon's Garage) demonstrated the artist's generous spirit and his protean energy. MacConnel installed the clowns salon-style on rounded, sconcelike wall pedestals made from corrugated cardboard and on modest bases made from plywood. The project offers a far-reaching survey of plastic trash, incorporating such exotica as a pungent green Mexican detergent bottle, a Greek coffee cup, a plaid bread wrapper, a pink plastic toy Jeep and a bashed-in can of Silly String. Like their modernist forebears, MacConnel's figures pay casual homage to ancient or primitive sources; Agricultural Products Clown (at Solomon) resembles an African bird sculpture; Green Bottle Lady Clown (at Quint) jokingly references the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus.

At Solomon, MacConnel included three large paintings that functioned as decorative supports for small groupings of clowns. In Nature's Gate, four clowns placed on a field of MacConnel's trademark multicolored polka dots are turned into denizens of outer space; the constellation of polka dots seems to provide a separate but equal planet for each clown. In Edge three clowns accent a gorgeously colored, wobbly stripe painting, thereby personalizing the abstract geometry.

Rather than suggesting portraits, MacConnel's clowns serve to humanize and further democratize the artist's decorative esthetic. By using plastic junk to make these populist icons, MacConnel both celebrates the abject and transcends it. In his hands, colorful trash becomes a celebratory reflection of our own foolishness and excess.

["The Age of Plastic" was seen at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York from Nov. 5 to Dec. 10, 1994.]

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