Jacob Mason Macklin: Underground

 

MAMOTH is pleased to present Underground, American artist Jacob Mason-Macklin’s European debut, on view from 30 November 2023 to 27 January 2024. Mason-Macklin is the 2023 artist in residence at MAMOTH. Underground marks the culmination of his residency, and presents a new body of work that builds on prior research explored during his 2021–22 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. 

 

A conversation initiated by the artist’s interest in locomotive and automobile-part dissection, Undergroundextends these themes into a continuum of further dislocation. Mason-Macklin’s oil-on-linen paintings fuse observational depictions of mechanical hardware with gestural renderings, articulating his fascination with sites of collision between sentient and mechanised subjects. These works reconstruct the relationship between the figure and the mechanical object on both abstracted and concrete terms.  

 

The residency in London has allowed Mason-Macklin to immerse himself in the unfamiliar, an adjustment that gives rise to reflections on place; his origins in America’s Midwest, often referred to as ‘the rust-belt’ and the country’s former industrial heartland, lie beside his memories of living and working in New York City. Acclimatising to yet another new cultural and geographical climate has given rise to a sense of alienation that adds fresh psychological layers to the core concepts of the work. Exploring a sense of natural disruption and the communicable conflicts this creates, these paintings also echo Mason-Macklin’s reckonings with dissonance in the face of displacement, a search for structure and traversing of grief while commenting on the ever-evolving structure of humankind.  

 

 

 

I spent the morning sitting outside our cabin for the weekend drawing the tree in the front yard. I write next to a loose contour line sketch of branches: “Some sort of inherent, massive, yet subtle, interruption in a natural design—the structure is understood to incorporate tendril networks situated within a sensorial space. Felt, seen, desired—roots, sunshine, shade.”  

 

Is what I’m searching for, this structural interruption, this dissonance, communicable within a recognizable form? Or is my focus more a mirroring of this dissonance I feel? The pressure of a mechanized existence; an encroachment on a sort of natural design. This dissonance feels like a collision between image and form; the painting being the subsequent result of its convergence. 

 

Coupled amongst the collisions, a slight shift in gear, I feel uncomfortable with the weight of a figurative image. I’ve kept an archive of screenshots featuring figures in motion, pausing in between frames to capture a glimpse of uncertainty between gestures. The freeze in motion creates a blur or a glitch; another sort of subtle interruption within the inherent structure of the figure. The low quality screenshot sparks the question, What is going on? Maybe this is how I feel? I’ve been searching through social media for the perfect portrait. A face, technologically veiled, optimizing one's features for beauty consequently rendering its user emotionless, robotic. Is it possible to achieve this simulated effect within a painted portrait? A detached affect on a sentient, emotional subject. Is this mechanized semblance possible or is failure more important? The balance between communicating sentience and mechanization, is this how I feel?

 

I grow inward the longer I’m here. In the studio, I began implementing a procedure of expression overlaying images of auto bodyparts, chassis, and mechanical hardware overtop brushy, clustered pockets of metallic colored gestures. The moment an image felt material I would attempt to destroy it. Wiping, scraping, and covering the  image until the head of a motor protruded through a field of blue-black exhaust, the  chest of a engine smeared into a field of slime green, or the limbs of cord cables  stretching out like branches looking for light disintegrate into a metal grey expanse.  The result forms a new type of body; organic, indiscernible, with traces of humanity leftover.  

 

 

 

Jacob Mason-Macklin lives and works in Queens, New York. Mason-Macklin graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 2017. He is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2021-2022, Mason-Macklin was an Artist-in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, New York, USA.Recent exhibitions include: “The Future Won't Be Long Now” at SOMEDAY, Lower Manhattan, New York, USA (2023); “It’s Time For Me To Go” at MOMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, USA (2022-2023); A dou-exhibition with artist Ryan Huggins at Page gallery, New York, USA (2021);  “Soul Procession” at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, New York, USA (2020); “Pure Hell” at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, USA (2020); “Bounty” with Cudelice Brazelton at the Jeffrey Stark Gallery in New York, USA, curated by Amanda Hunt (2017); etc.