| It’s an old New York story: Artist moves to industrial-cum-desolate neighborhood, other artists follow, then the artist is promptly priced out of the zip code when boutiques and a less scrappy stock of settlers invade. This is the nature of the beast in a property-starved city. Unnecessary wastefulness is the thematic glue that conjoins McKendree Key’s sculptures, photographs, and collages, but is posed most aggressively in her installations. Key creates site-specific installations that fragment the room into cubic yards with neon yellow mason twine. The environment is activated through experience; viewers are invited and expected to enter, to negotiate a conduit through the tensile web. Key’s project room at P.S.1 continued her project of slicing and reconstituting space. |
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Nick Stillman
Courtesy of the artist.It’s an old New York story: Artist moves to industrial-cum-desolate neighborhood, other artists follow, then the artist is promptly priced out of the zip code when boutiques and a less scrappy stock of settlers invade. This is the nature of the beast in a property-starved city.
Unnecessary wastefulness is the thematic glue that conjoins McKendree Key’s sculptures, photographs, and collages, but is posed most aggressively in her installations. Key creates site-specific installations that fragment the room into cubic yards with neon yellow mason twine. The environment is activated through experience; viewers are invited and expected to enter, to negotiate a conduit through the tensile web.
Key’s project room at P.S.1 continued her project of slicing and reconstituting space. For her 2006 work Pier 17: Space # 2085 Divided into Cubic Yards, an installation in a vacant sporting goods store in the South Street Seaport, Key segmented the airy, open space into small units that viewers needed to climb through in order to discover the radiant sightlines her grid of string established. Prior to this, she experimented with dividing exhibition spaces with spandex. For Half Spaces: 207 Franklin St. #1, she divided her entire apartment in half with the material.
Like with her grids, Key forces, with her spandex divisions, a choice on the viewer: to gaze at the piece from a distance—to treat it as an object—or to engage it, to assume its challenge of spatial reorganization. Her Half Spaces installation in her Franklin Street apartment in Brooklyn revealed underutilized or previously unnoticed space right before the viewer’s eyes. In her recent installations, Key returns to utilitarianism. Included in her project room at P.S.1 were several pieces of her own furniture. As Key was in the process of moving out of her apartment in Greenpoint, the project room would double as storage, a pragmatic solution to that commonest of New York City quandaries: lack of space. If Key’s division of the gallery into cubic yards nods to a system of measurement for real estate, her employment of it as a warehouse for the term of the exhibition conjures the grim narrative of gentrification’s constant ravages on this city’s art community.
