Kim MacConnel

The centerpiece of a Pattern and Decoration–fest filling six Bergamot Station venues, this exhibition showcases thirty years of work by San Diego–area artist Kim MacConnel, one of the best-known West Coast P&D devotees. Curated by Michael Duncan, who organized two other P&D shows on view across the parking lot, this survey revealed MacConnel’s work as far more complex than the words “pattern” and “decoration” might imply.

A piece like Top Dollar, 1979, confirms MacConnel as a lover of color and a shrewd practitioner of garish formalism, and demonstrates the artist’s flair for smart semiotic play on the levels of style, material, symbol, and image. In this work, MacConnel overlays clip art–ish diagrams of modern architecture onto patchwork and plaid; images of transistor radios atop diamond-based geometric patterns; and electrons orbiting nuclei over a handkerchief’s pinwheels and snowflakes.

MacConnel reminds us of what every homemaker knows—that decoration denotes, connotes, and implies, that it’s a channel as effective as any sign system for the delivery and subversion of ideas. In Flourishing Sideline Occupations, 1978, one fabric scrap is pit against another. Stiff plaid bridles against the exotic/erotic tiger stripe, and swatches of doughnut shapes, checkerboards, and floral motifs become just as “tribal” as the more “ethnic” patterns with which they share territory. Red Lantern, 1975, an early painting on bedsheets, is made up of vertical strips, each itself containing a pattern. The ensemble seems innocent until one notices the crossed rifles and sheaves of wheat repeating on the far left and the sitting duck recurring on the far right. But clear messages bow out in favor of more poetic slippage in MacConnel’s creations, which, while appearing to reference the “surface scan,” instead propose a world where nothing should be taken at face value.

At times MacConnel seems to prioritize the formal qualities or curiosity value of his borrowed materials above a more informed use—but on the other hand, perhaps this position is right on. He privileges neither form nor content on anything other than a case-by-case basis, and by this token he’s a surrogate for all of us who employ and encounter visual culture from myriad, ever-waffling points of understanding and engagement. From this perspective, MacConnel is part of a lineage that includes the Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and the Pop artists, as well as more recent figures such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle, and Mike Kelley—artists who place quotation and juxtaposition at the center of practices devoted simultaneously to formal concerns and to plays of meaning. In terms of attitude, however, MacConnel may be more akin to decorative West Coasters like Karen Carson, Carole Caroompas, Lari Pittman, and Alexis Smith. His colorful composites might well have their dark and uncomfortable passages, but ultimately they propose not a drama of anxiety and endgame but a celebration of life and endless possibility.

—Christopher Miles