Cathy McClure "Menagerie"
"Youll never look at those cute little mechanical stuffed bunnies the same way again. On Thursday, Moss unveils Remains, an exhibition by the artist Cathy McClure, whose particular passion is taking these mass-produced, eminently disposable items and redesigning them as precious objects. McClure strips away the plush motorized creatures furry coats and fluffy stuffing and then casts the animals plastic bodies and limbs in bronze, while leaving most of their mechanisms intact but exposed. A rabbits ears, for instance, are reduced to their antenna-like spring supports, while a formerly cocky rooster drags his now-heavy body around, crowing as if he were still king of the barnyard. If the movie Mad Max had had a toyshop, these half-whimsical, half-disturbing animals would have fit right in. But theyre strictly for big kids now, with their sumptuous bronze bodies and five-figure price tags."
- PILAR VILADAS "New York Times
There’s no way a photograph can convey the grotesque hilarity of
Cathy McClure’s creatures. That’s why I’ve begun this Studio Visit post with a video I borrowed from her website instead of delving headfirst into the shots I took last week at her studio. She calls her sculptures “bots,” but if you ask me that’s way too cute a word for these rascally terrors. McClure is first and foremost a metalsmith, and she also makes
zoetrope installationsthat are breathtaking and strange. But it’s the bots that are all over the East Nashville space that she and her husband are staying in through May.
Her process for creating the bots is deceptively simple — by taking the fur off of the battery-powered toy animals and recasting them in silver or bronze, McClure can reassemble them into little metallic clanking gargoyles. Without their fur and with metal bones instead of plastic, the movements become stiffer and audibly rickety, like the cymbal-banging monkey in a Stephen King story. McClure leaves certain elements intact in their original material — baby-doll eyes that peek out at you like a scene from House of Wax, or extremities like a tail or a trunk that seem to be shaped like spinal columns. I find them terrifying, but a co-worker whom I sent the above video to thought they were hilarious. Our final consensus: a little from column A, a little from column B.
