Roy McMakin Reviewed in Artforum
December 2016
The dozen or so objects—call them sculpture, furniture, or something poised indeterminately in between—included in Roy McMakin’s recent exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery for the most part proceeded from a superficially simple line of inquiry: What happens to a conventionally functional artifact when that artifact has its conventional function tampered with? It’s a question with which McMakin—a Wyoming-born artist and craftsman who studied at the University of California, San Diego, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s with teachers such as Allan Kaprow and Manny Farber and who today also works both as an architect and a commercial furniture designer—has spent years engaging.
Roy McMakin Reviewed on Hyperallergic
October 23, 2016
Some of the objects are conjoined, like Siamese twins, or nested inside each other, like memories. Others are grouped together — four identical green tables, each twenty-seven inches high, or two white chairs, one proportionately smaller than the other. At one point, while looking at the green tables, I had the sudden urge to wipe the dust off one of them, except there wasn’t any dust.