Kian Mckeown

Lives and works in New York State

Artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist born and based in New York City. I make anthropomorphic, multi-media sculptures and drawings in response to my everyday waking fantasies and desires, skewing quotidian scenes and objects into syntheses of pain, awkwardness, shame and sex. My works examine the social and material symptoms of being inundated by manufactured images on a daily basis. In my drawings I present imagery that conflates a language of daydreaming with the frustration of everyday life. These drawings are reminiscent of technical drawings for inventions that do not yet exist, but could support, accommodate, accentuate, harm, or pleasure a body. A full figure is never pictured. By presenting scenarios that at first seem painful- often involving tearing skin and metal parts embedded into the body, these works pose deviancy as a path to freedom. My sculptures, made with coated wood and paper-mache, often represent oversized and skewed versions of familiar objects—a door stop, a jack—in ways that allude to parts of a body. The shapes of some objects are hybrids of sex toys, children' s toys, and common tools. They question the formal qualities of these kinds of objects; what distinguishes something as an object of utility versus an object of pleasure or violence. Although my work follows a framework of narrative, it defies straightforward explanation. This obscuring of narrative is intentional as I never ask a viewer to understand a specific idea, but to pay attention and...

Artwork