Matthew McCaslin Illuminates the Art World with Machines, Light, and Meaning
- Brainz Magazine
- May 6
- 5 min read
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
For the past four decades, Matthew McCaslin has created a new paradigm in the realm of sculpture and installations. He has had solo shows in London, Paris, Dijon, Cologne, Hamburg, and Gent. What makes the work unique and of interest to both art dealers and curators is the use of and power of electricity to charge, activate, and define his work. Whether by means of composing with lights or silent video, there is always an electronic component that underscores and ignites his concepts and vision.
The use of electric lights, like Dan Flavin, whose revolutionary breakthrough employed color fluorescent tubes to create geometric forms and room-size installations, McCaslin’s pieces are more akin to Rauschenberg’s “Combines”; a well-planned juxtaposition of found objects, store-bought materials, hardware, and recycled video loops. These constructions are assembled into a single object or part of a larger installation. Added to this conceptual formula: electricity, a silent, invisible force that illuminates lights and powers his constructions. It is this use of electricity that distinguishes these works in their originality and dramatic character. In fact, the light gives life to his imaginative works.
McCaslin’s studio is not the usual artist’s studio one might imagine. Instead, it is a workshop filled with construction materials of oversized shape and power tools, something you might find on a job site where a building campaign is in progress. Add to this hardware metal cables, electrical wire, outlets, plugs, switches, and an array of fans, clocks, and even video monitors. When brought together, each resulting work is the embodiment of the formal character and quality of someone like David Smith and the seemingly quirky engineering skills of Jean Tinguely, or assemblages of Arman McCaslin’s machines don’t self-destruct as one might find in a Tinguely sculpture or an amalgam of parts as in Arman. Instead, just the opposite, for they mark the passage of time and the mechanics of life as measured by clocks, illuminated by electricity, articulated by the slow motion of fans across the face of a wall. Each, in fact, is a kind of contemporary tableau played out not by people but by machines.
Typical of this tableau formula are a pair of wall reliefs titled He or She 2009. Using industrial gauge wire and light bulbs, McCaslin invents a pair of curvilinear forms hung vertically. Their outline refers to the human body, but here the body is all mechanical, gender unknown, or perhaps, the 21st century’s version of Adam & Eve? As one critic explained, “recasting sockets, bulbs and conduits as elements of formal language that hovers between the organic and mechanical, the familiar utilitarian and the abstract.”
Orient Point. The title, referring to his Long Island roots, is one of many such relief wall works that also employ a light element. In this series, lights are clustered together, and fluorescent bulbs are stacked or fitted side by side. In such works, and there are many, light is the key element that captures our attention. The radical use of light as a tool in art making is balanced and combined with varied objects; each sculpture becomes a very formal aesthetic composition. Here, he joins with other artists from around the world who use and experiment with light as a subject: John Armleder in Switzerland, Keith Sonnier in the U.S, and Tadayo Miyajima in Japan. A survey of this topic is long overdue since it is such a contemporary topic and universal theme, and engages artists from so many different places and cultures.
Another kind of work is Adrift, a floor piece making use of very different materials united in one statement. Here, images of the ocean on several monitors stacked on a used and well-worn mattress, the sensation of being lost or “adrift” is now made real. The sensations and feelings of being lost at sea are made manifest in this sculptural staging. Over the course of his career, McCaslin has created many such situations, stagings, as I describe them. Typical too is a much earlier video installation, Bloomer, shown in New York in 1996 and now in the collection of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Chicago. Here was an arrangement of a dozen or so floor-bound video monitors arranged along the length of the gallery. With imagery of flowers appearing on the screens, the space was transformed into a kind of artificial electronic garden with flowers silently blooming at different moments. The narrative character of video allows McCaslin to add a storyline to his work to identify the meaning or theme of the sculpture or installation.
With numerous shows in Europe over the course of his career, in 2004 he was in France creating an installation for the Museum of Modern Art in St. Etienne: SleepWalking On the 27th Floor, a room-sized installation created for that space by aluminum, then in the midst a neon light. As described in an early monograph on the artist, the installations simulate a condition of permanent upheaval; much seems to be in progress or the bones of a construction, yet it is the “bones” that are his focus.
More recently, in a 2022 solo show, this exhibition of wire works, using heavy gauge wire normally used for the understructure of clay figures, McCaslins explores and exploits the weight and linear quality of the material at hand. Elongated like a tall, thin Giacometti figure, they hang floating yet weighty. They are both elegant and unusual, as if he were able to transfer a drawn line on paper into a three-dimensional sculptural statement. McCaslin commented:
I was interested in creating some works that were just a byproduct of very direct bending and immediate gestures with no reflection on anything but the moment of their creation. The silver metal was perfect for creating speeds of light as it reflects light.
McCaslin endlessly rethinks the notion of what a sculpture is. What does it contain, how is it made, and what do such works mean? He is transforming very ordinary materials into unique visual statements. And like those artists before him, those of the Arte Povera movement in Italy or Post Minimalism in America, he is always experimenting to find new solutions to the idea of sculpture.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
