Clint Eastwood
Andrea McGinty
February 10 - March 12, 2022
SUNNY NY is pleased to present Andrea McGinty’s inaugural solo exhibition in New York City. Titled Clint Eastwood, the exhibition will debut new sculptures and photo-based collages, channeling themes of Americana, individualism, and alienation through the mundane images and objects that populate our daily lives.Andrea McGinty
February 10 - March 12, 2022
Andrea McGinty’s magpie constructions bask in the extremely banal, combining overlooked items into elegantly self-contained universes. Metal flagpoles are cemented firmly in plastic jugs that formerly contained bleach or cat litter, hoisting up subjects for contemplation. Banners are eschewed in favor of plastic replicas of vegetables, nicotine lozenge containers, and the occasional dead bee, among other things, conjuring associations with domesticity, health, safety, and nature as seen through a consumer lens. Some of the items reappear in distinct works, an echo of favorite brands that nods to the emotional aspects of shopping. Like trees in a forest, the sculptures delineate a winding, irregular path for viewers to navigate. Moving through the room, one can imagine a caricature of the artist as a sort of homebody-meets-archivist: methodically collecting and reordering her material surroundings until they reach a point of resolution.
The components of McGinty’s sculptures retain their own independent physical identities, yet our perception of what they represent shifts through their deft positioning and proximity to one another. Horse reimagines the familiar couple’s costume with a workaround for a lone individual. While the head and front legs are filled out, the hindquarters of the creature are noticeably vacant. Minimally supported by a flagpole in a detergent jug, the horse’s formless butt eerily hovers without its faux fur back legs. Elsewhere in the gallery hangs a second solo horse costume against the wall. Titled The Man with No Name, the lifeless garment is shown with zipper and tail suggestively displayed. Redirecting the costume’s comic potential is a handwritten note pinned to the hide, listing off the ingredients for a turkey sandwich like poetic verse. Can an object long for its own completion? In McGinty’s hands, seemingly ridiculous or unremarkable things become characters in their own right and act as subversively sincere, relatable evocations of our interior selves.
As in her sculptures, quietly ordinary images form the basis for McGinty’s photographic collages: an up-close view of strewn hay, hydrangeas in bloom, a folding chair on a patio at night. They originate as the sort of diaristic shots snapped on a cellphone camera strictly to broadcast mood via social media, but otherwise quickly forgotten, left to languish in the bottomless depths of digital memory; here they resurrect, transformed IRL. The photographs are blown up and printed on vinyl before being slashed, layered and woven together. Each intervention obscures or reveals pictorial information, moving further away from the subject matter while shaping them into new entities. Teasing out humanity from the clutter of the everyday, McGinty’s works offer a meditative reprocessing of contemporary existence.
Andrea McGinty (b. 1985, Sunrise, FL) is an artist and writer based in Hamden, New York. She received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2014, and a BA in Art History from Florida Atlantic University in 2007. McGinty’s work has been exhibited internationally, with solo and two-person exhibitions at East Hampton Shed (East Hampton, NY), Holiday Forever (Jackson, WY), and Miami Prácticas Contempoaneas (Bogotá, Colombia). She was awarded a fellowship with The Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY) in 2018. She is the author of “Ah Yes, Bad Things”, a photography and poetry chapbook published by Soft City Printing (Brooklyn, NY) in 2017, and “God, I Don't Even Know Your Name”, a novella published by Badlands Unlimited (New York, NY) in 2015, which was released as part of Paul Chan’s Hugo Boss Prize exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of Art the same year. Her work has been featured in publications such as Mousse Magazine, W Magazine, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.
SUNNY NY is currently open by appointment only through February 9th. Contact Hadley Vogel at director.sunnygallery@gmail.com to arrange your visit in advance. The gallery will resume regular hours on February 10th, and will be open to public Thursday through Saturday, 12-6pm.
For press inquiries, please contact Renee Delosh at renee.sunnygallery@gmail.com. For inquiries about the artist and available works, please contact Russel Tyler at sales.sunnygallery@gmail.com or Hadley Vogel at director.sunnygallery@gmail.com
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