Mollie McKinley: The Survival Language of Beauty
Beauty is not an irrelevant, superficial thing in times of crisis.
Here I mean beauty as a visual language of poetics, a way of interpreting the world through unconventional means.
Mollie McKinley’s work is beautiful and mysterious. It has an uncanny, otherworldly quality, yet it is solidly grounded in the earth. McKinley deftly moves between photography, performance, video, sculpture, and text, often combining several mediums in one work. For example, in her series Desert Gestures, Habitat Return she documented solo performances in the California desert and photographed one of her salt sculptures on the eroded rocks. More than a backdrop, nature is a powerful force whose presence is palpable. Her work references the American landscape, evoking myths of the wilderness and those who reside on the fringes of society. In her photographs and performances McKinley assumes the role of the priestess, a figure who moves between two worlds: the past and the present, the natural and human world, and the world of the living and the spiritual dimension. This liminal existence is an important underlying theme in her work.
A talented writer, McKinley uses text to add another dimension to her compelling images. Writing has increasingly become an important part of her practice. This essay will focus on three recent works that feature text: Dune / Shift, Sublimation into Stone, and The Survival Language of Beauty, the latter of which is a new piece she has been working on for the past month that is inspired by recent events.
Dune / Shift
McKinley has been creating sculpture and installations for the past decade, with her primary mediums being salt, glass, and wood. Her outdoor sculpture Dune / Shift marked a significant development in her work and was her first public sculpture commission. It was created in 2019 for an exhibition produced by the Newburgh Sculpture Project at SUNY Orange in Newburgh, NY and curated by Kelly Schroer. Dune / Shift was a cutaway of a coastal Atlantic sand dune with live native grasses in a triangular sculptural support installed on a site overlooking the Hudson River. McKinley writes: “the transference of the dune from its maritime environment to the Hudson Highlands evokes a mystic convergence of the two landscapes. The wind tunnel of the location activates the dune grasses, creating movement and sound that evokes the memory of a visit to the ocean. Hudson Valley marsh birds are often heard, adding to the effect of converging landscapes.”
McKinley staged a poetry reading at the Dune / Shift site on September 28, 2019 featuring poets and artists Mary Reilly, Eva Deitch, and Savannah Knoop. McKinley read an except from The Unceremony, a prose work about her childhood experience spending summers on Cape Cod in a house that had been in her father’s family for generations. She describes the house and nearby beaches and explains the importance of this place to her early awareness of herself and where she came from. She identifies with the dunes, which exist in the spaces between the ocean and the marsh, the sea and the land. The grasses and shrubs that grow on them are some of the most resilient species on earth. McKinley writes: “I also dream of dunes, in particular the dune that I would ascend before the land opened up to the sea below, of my favorite beach. This dune was a portal to the water, a portal to the incantation of the body rising and falling over it, a young lover to the earth itself. Although it was wrought in the past, within an enchantment of place and being, it is a harbinger for the future. From the sand’s womb I am reborn again and again as the dark sheep dune witch, seeking connection to the unknown through speaking with the wind on the marsh grasses.”
Dune / Shift represents McKinley’s ongoing interest in erosion, time, and site. The placement of the ocean dune near the Hudson River gave the effect of two landscapes converging in one space. The dune grass changed from green to brown as the season moved from summer to fall, highlighting the cycles of nature and the passing of time. The work also referenced climate change, as the landscape of Cape Cod has been eroded at an accelerated rate in recent years.
Sublimation Into Stone
McKinley’s performance Sublimation Into Stone continues some of the intellectual explorations of Dune / Shift, but with the desert as her muse. The performance took place on February 8, 2020 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz and was curated by Anna Conlan. The performance begins when McKinley, in the role of the priestess, enters the gallery pulling a cart behind her on which is piled an assortment of natural and manmade objects. She is dressed in black and wears a white headdress and plastic sandals. The desert is referenced by a live cactus in a plastic bucket, a branch of eucalyptus, stones, and blocks of salt. McKinley slowly takes each object off the cart one by one, and places them in a circle on the gallery floor. When the objects have all been placed, McKinley sits on the cart and reads a poem titled Sublimation Into Stone. The text describes the stillness and silence of the desert, the dissolution of American culture, and the body in relation to the earth. The following is an excerpt:
you weep for weeks, nourish the rocks with your tears
The stones treat you as their own,
recognize your parched, weathered edges
they count your days and the pounds of your soft body
They contemplate your ancestral sediment, inert but awake
day by day, minute transmutations into something else — until you are
A Sublimation Into Stone
At the end of the reading, McKinley slowly gathers the objects and places them back on the cart. She exits the gallery through the crowd of people pulling everything behind her. I attended the performance and found it to be powerful and moving. McKinley succeeded in creating a charged space in the museum with the presentation of her writing in tandem with the striking imagery of her performance. Sublimation Into Stone, as well as the series of photographs Desert Performances for No Audience contains gestures of refuge, frustration, contraction, and surrender as personal and cultural healing practices.
Sublimation Into Stone took place during the opening of Collecting Local: Twelve Years of the Hudson Valley Artists Annual Purchase Award, curated by Anna Conlan. The exhibition features artwork purchased by the Dorsky Museum through the Hudson Valley Artists Annual Purchase Award and includes McKinley’s photograph Cholla Bag with Toe Hole Stocking, Reaching, which was acquired in 2018. Unfortunately the exhibition was only open for a few weeks before the museum was forced to close temporarily due to COVID-19.
The Survival Language of Beauty
McKinley’s most recent work, The Survival Language of Beauty, combines photography and text in a single image. She has been studying artists’ writings and the ways in which text functions to both define their practice and give them a voice within our larger culture. McKinley is particularly influenced by the text works of Zoe Leonard, Jenny Holzer, Robert Smithson, and Fluxus manifestos. She comments: “Language is such a direct and evocative communication tool. Pairing it with the visual poetics of photography, performance, or sculpture gives a more inter-dimensional sense of an idea. A part of your brain that doesn’t process something visually might latch onto a phrase or set of rhythmic words, or vice versa. Ultimately this approach is about accessibility—being real about the fact that not everyone digests information in the same way, and wanting to offer different entry points for people.”
The image in The Survival Language of Beauty is a photograph of a window in an interior space. The view outside the window is hazy, as if looking through a film or a fog. There are gates and spires resembling a cemetery just outside. The yellow orb of the sun is glowing in the sky, either rising or setting. It’s a mysterious image. The text to the left describes a type of beauty and also sets forth what beauty is not. McKinley writes: “It is not the beauty that is used as a tool by colonial and patriarchal structures against our minds and bodies and it is not connected to class and power and to ‘taste’.” She is referring to an awareness of beauty that is more sublime, a way of seeing, a shift in perception towards quiet and curiosity. This form of beauty can offer relief from trauma and inspire compassion for the lived experience of others; it exists in the cycles of life and it is a container for what is unknown. McKinley’s text ends with the following words: Beauty exists as an open invitation for union with the mysterious, waiting for you to sweep the curtains of your seeing open. It wants you. It wants to be seen by you.
The Survival Language of Beauty is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we are forced to stay home, many of us will pass our days more quietly, take walks, pay more attention to nature, and spend time with family. There is a kind of beauty to be found in this moment, despite the hardship and loss. McKinley’s text about beauty is not only a meditation on these times, but represents all the complexity and power of her imagery. It is, to me, a description of her entire body of work.
Mollie McKinley was the subject of a solo exhibition at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY in 2017. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY; the Ireland Glass Biennale, Dublin Castle Coach House, Dublin, Ireland; SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Baxter Street/Camera Club of New York, Anthology Film Archives, and the MoMA Pop Rally, New York, NY; Coaxial Arts, Los Angeles, CA; the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY; and One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY. McKinley’s work has been featured on Clocktower Radio, and in Vice, Fjords Review, Nylon Magazine, and Apogee Literary Journal (Columbia University). Her writing on radical education has been published in “Performance Research.” She was a 2018 Creative Glass Center of America Fellow at Wheaton Arts, and is a teaching artist at Dia: Beacon. She studied photography and film/video at Bard College and currently lives in Newburgh, NY. For more information visit her website and follow her on Instagram @mollie_mckinley.
