Audio By Carbonatix
Michael Jones McKean is the rare talent who makes the impossible seem tangible. The artist, who was born in Micronesia, is best known for his sprawling installations that stretch the limits of an object and its representation. For instance, he once used towering chutes of water to manifest a rainbow over Omaha.
Beginning at 6 p.m. at Wynwood’s Emerson Dorsch Gallery (151 NW 24th St., Miami), during the monthly Second Saturday Art Walk, the wildly inventive talent will mark his South Florida debut in “We Float Above to Spit and Sing.” The sweeping solo exhibit, curated by Tara Strickstein, features a remarkable suite of new sculptures, collages, and low-relief wall works. The display promises an experience bordering on myth and magic, as Jones McKean expands the possibilities of perception. Oscillating between reality and the ineffable, Jones McKean’s disembodied heads and limbs invite spectators to reconsider the recognizable through a spirited imagination.
To accomplish the feat, the artist uses unique and widely varying materials — wigs, prosthetic silicone, makeup, arm casts, cell phones, dried Himalayan wildflowers, ancient pottery shards, meteorite fragments, fabric swatches from ethnographic blankets, vitamins, Adderall, morphine, and other objects — to transport viewers to an otherworldly dimension.
May 17-July 31, 6 p.m., 2014
