A Sustained Glimpse | Jacob Mason-Macklin in Conversation with Rodney McMillian

Jacob Mason-Macklin’s (b. 1995, Columbus, OH; lives and works in Queens, NY) work explores the collision between image and material. Utilizing archival images and personal forms, Mason-Macklin investigates new modes and subjects in an attempt to channel a current that is raw, murky, and desirous. His practice has been driven by a fascination with media from the Soul Power era in the United States. Distorting screenshots of Soul Train set designs, stills from Blaxploitation films, and cover art for mid-twentieth century R&B and funk albums such as James Brown’s Hell (1974) and Marvin Gaye‘s I Want You (1976), Mason-Macklin uses slashing, cutting, and undulating brushstrokes to create a standoff between the corporeal and the imaged in order to simultaneously embrace and unsettle motifs of libido and violence typified in counterculture iconography. Mason-Macklin is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Page (with Ryan Huggins), New York (2021); Interstate Projects, New York (2020); No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2020); and Jeffrey Stark Gallery (with Cudelice Brazelton), New York (2017).

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969, Columbia, South Carolina; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. Most recently, McMillian’s monumental landscape painting shaft (2021) was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and his installation From Asterisks in Dockery (2022) has been traveling as part of the exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, which originated at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Other recent solo exhibitions include the Underground Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Austin; the ICA Philadelphia; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and MoMA PS.1. McMillian’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany, among many others.