Dead Ambassadors: Kevin Clancy

Jan 13

Jan 13 Dead Ambassadors: Kevin Clancy

Artist Profile, Santa Barbara, Print Issue

by Julian Harake

A cracked iPhone screen spells disaster for most people. For Kevin Clancy, it’s a moment of transformation.

A cell phone flies from our hands, landing on the pavement; water spills on a keyboard; the internet is out; a cat jumps on a desk; a Zoom meeting is interrupted. These sudden perceptual shifts are rendered solid objects, made from plaster, resin, dichroic film, latex, LED lights and other engineered materials.

*Kevin Clancy, Rare Earth, cast ultracal 30, dichroic film, glass, optical glass, carbon steel, silicon, jade, bismuth, fossils, shells. Detail from Screen Time Paradox, 2023*

Clancy—a sculptor, Pittsburgh native and teaching fellow at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies—explores how our attention and gadgets meet the entropic influences of the real world. The resulting works are ethereal and foreboding. In The Ubiquity of Loneliness (2017), a cracked glass screen protector separates two nearly-touching plaster fingers: a contemporary redux of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. W3B5 (2022), a laser engraved acrylic spider’s web, is an object both intricate and crude, referencing the strength of design found in nature that humans fail to match. In Hollow Holo (2019), several plaster hands, holding dichroic screen protectors, float against a gridded retail display structure, forming an LED illuminated altarpiece for a disembodied and commercially driven culture.

*Kevin Clancy, Portal, cast hydrocal, dichroic film, steel*

Regardless of scale or materials, Clancy's sculptures appeal to our haptic and visual senses; the multitudinous ways and degrees by which we meet the world—whether distractedly through our phones or more presently through our hands. Hand wrought plaster casts of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks—sometimes propped onto each other or turned into water fountains—attest to a culture too visually distracted to notice its degrading corporeality. Yet such undertones are not overbearing, and his sculptures are open enough to project other things into them: plaster death masks, one’s own aging, the climate crisis, the loneliness epidemic or the artist himself.

*Kevin Clancy, A Mutual Erosion, cast hydrocal, ultracal, vinyl, retroreflective fabric, purple pillow, satin, plastic, aquatic pumps, tubing, custom LED strip lights. Detail from Aether Net, 2022*

The collective effect of these works is not unlike Borges’s The Secret Miracle, where time slows down as the protagonist faces execution by firing squad. As bullets hurl toward him, he is granted a full year—experienced by only him—by which to finish his novel.

Whether fictional or real, the transcendental potential of one's own perception and revelations around the despair of ecological ruin, commercialism, neofascism and pandemic offer artworks of unexpected possibility.

As Clancy laser etched on dichroic window film, “Other worlds are possible.”