Laurie McKenna
Laurie examines and distills US history, personal experience, and bereft and orphaned cultural narratives. Her mediums include video, drawing, writing, performance, and installation.
Category: Artist/Individual
Discipline: Other
Program Affiliations: Arts Foundation Grantees
About Laurie McKenna
Laurie McKenna (born 1963, Massachusetts) is a cross disciplinary artist whose work examines and engages socio-economic, political and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, she combines and distills personal experience and bereft and dispossessed cultural narratives. Her work is deeply attached to labor, place, and margins. Most of her projects involve deep research to create a body of work using multiple mediums: drawing, mixed media, writing, video, and installation. In the past 10 years she has had funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, The Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona, the Bisbee Arts Commission, and was a recipient of an award from the University of Arizona Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry which was funded by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
https://www.rockpaperfence.com/
Installing The Undesirables at Cornelius Project San Pedro, California
The Undesirables
This mixed media installation acts as a memorial to labor history. On July 12th, 1917 in Bisbee, Arizona the mining companies and the Sheriff armed over 2000 citizens and rounded up 1,196 striking miners and their supporters, marched them to the baseball park, loaded them onto cattle cars, and banished them to the desert of New Mexico. The strike was called by the IWW. The workers were accused of being subversives, unpatriotic and a threat to public safety.The Undesirables is comprised of the following: 1917 penny rubbings (1196) onto a slips of paper with the names of striking and deported men, a series of large scale drawings, A video loop, 3 video vignettes, 4 pamphlets and pennants and a penny smasher with 4 designs to choose from.
Press Badge installed at Bisbee Arts Commission Art Festival
Press Badge
Drawings, assemblage (handmade press badges), QR code interactivity, video. This project brings the first amendment, and in particular, journalists and the freedom of the press. Using the U.S.Press Freedom Tracker, an online database which tracks abuse against journalists, this project transforms data into a mixed media installation honoring the journalists working in the US in the time frame of May 2020 to January 6, 2021. A book of all the drawings and writing about art as a means to respond to social injustices is underway. Using dirty laundry the need to bring truth into the sunlight, as a metaphor, the press badges are strung on lanyards and hung on a laundry line. The public can scan QR codes for each story depicted of over 100 journalists that have been arrested, detained, attacked, or abused. Almost every incident captured in this project happened at marches when people raised voices in support for Lives Matter The creation of press badges is ongoing.
This multimedia project (ongoing) was born of the pandemic, and is currently focusing on horseshoe crabs, 450 mil year old sea creatures whose blood is used in biomedical process of making vaccines.
Aggregate
Drawings, video (loop and single channel), and objects 2020 - Present
1. A whole formed by combining several (typically disparate) elements.
2. A material or structure formed from a loosely compacted mass of fragments or particles.
A body of work that is about place (border, Southeast Arizona), resistance, my place of origin (New England coast) freedom of the Press (Press Badge), excessive force, animals, birds, the pandemic, and loss. The video Aggregate has been screened in Bisbee, Cornell, NY, and Berlin, Germany as part of an artist collective X-trACTION. most recently in Mexico City at the film space La Cueva.
Between 2021 and 2024 Aggregate has been supported and made possible with funding from the Bisbee Arts Commission, the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona Creosote StART to Heal Grant, and an award/ mini-grant from the Confluence Center of Creative Inquiry, as part of the Fronteritades program at the University of Arizona, which was supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
