Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Isabelle Frances McGuire
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: The Renaissance Society
64%
Sleeping Vampire. 2024. Thermoplastic, child-size costume, paint, imitation dirt, plywood
Along with an exhibition pamphlet featuring half-explanatory/half-poetic descriptions, this piece and the other seven works in McGuire's show Year Zero combined intricately to form the total artwork of the exhibition itself. As such, it's a bit disingenuous to treat this or any of the others as discrete works, though the artist gave each a name and presented them in that brochure as separate things, so there's justification for me to've done it the way I've done it. Anyway, this Sleeping Vampire (there's another piece with the same name; they're sort of a diptych) was the best individual thing in the show, mostly because of the way the capacity for verisimilitude of the artist's technique (she 3D prints bodies from "medical CT scans of anonymous women" — this is in the brochure) runs aground here and there in ways that are at once visually stimulating and conceptually productive. Look at the kid-sized doll's hands, for instance: wispy as if they're withered and ridged as if they printer failed, which makes the healthy-haired well-attired thing seem sickly first and then other than real. There's tragedy, too, to the stiff smallness of the figure against the anonymous largeness of her bed of fake soil. (2025)
Chicago, IL: The Renaissance Society (2025)
40%
Symbolic Birth Cabin Unit. 2024. Imitation logs, mudding, plywood, paint
More than it's an artwork, this full-scale replica of Abe Lincoln's home is a component of the total artwork that was McGuire's exhibition Year Zero. But it's named, so the artist opened it up for treatment as a discrete work. As a discrete work, it's got some kind of post-internet dimension to it — like, to physically recreate within the art-context an existing cultural object that's crammed with all sorts of various significances is to point to the virtuality/contingency of the significance of the original "real" object itself. But like okay, we've known since PoMo that that's a thing you can do with objects and their meaning, so I guess the aesthetic rub is supposed to be that the cabin's literal emptiness, the logs' plastic look, and the yellowness of the "mudding" (per the medium list) toss the object down into the uncanny valley? That would seem to make it more of a "sculpture" than the real/unreal semiotic play suggests it ought to be. Some of these problems are resolved by its position within the overall installation, wherein it is one semi-real thing among several semi-real things delivered through the cloyingly real institutional framework of the art gallery, which McGuire played like an instrument. (2025)