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MICHAEL McGILLIS
Born Detroit, 1966
BFA, College for Creative Studies
Lives in Royal Oak, Michigan
I have suspected for a little while that Michael McGillis is a fulcrum between divergent layers of reality. How
else to explain his uncanny ability to peel back the edges of our everyday world, to uncover hidden environments
just below the surface? Taken as a whole, McGillis’ work could be seen as a kind of sculptural iteration of
magical realism, where undefined or fantastic realities cohabitate within the everyday fixtures that are easily
taken for granted. Whether outfitting nature with chance art encounters, like Wake, or constructing immersive
gallery installations that synthesize nature in a controlled setting, as with Reckoning a Peripheral Wilderness,
McGillis confesses to an “attraction to randomness” which draws him toward found and discarded materials as
the foundation for these imagined realities.
These materials—which include phragmites reeds, branches, plastic sheeting, and layers of cardboard in various
states of disintegration—help McGillis to do what he terms “collaborating with chance,” but he is also quick to
acknowledge an element of surrogacy in their use, with materials holding space as proxies for other things, just
as his installations carve out microcosmic placeholders within reality. McGillis also enjoys playing with scale,
prone to leave the viewer towering above miniature dioramas, such as Blast Fishermen, Semporna, Malaysia—
with the ocean scaled to approximately half the surface of a discarded mattress—or else reduced to the
perspective of a small, root-dwelling mammal housed inside a giant stump, as in Your Back to the Woods.
But scale is also a mechanism of control, which McGillis wields—consciously or otherwise—to counterbalance
the elements of chance that he cultivates. An old fleece jacket may trigger the revelation of a hilly landscape, but
then a meticulous diorama emerges, drawing random inspiration into the tightly-rendered formation of Gypsy
Moth Defoliation and Cell Tower, Shenandoah, Virginia, part of his 2003 “Micro-Disasters” series. As
companion to these mini-environments, McGillis’ body of sited works create situational encounters in nature,
and these works—positioned to be encountered by chance—regain control through the elements of surprise,
immersion, and a kind of involuntary interactivity.
Most recently, McGillis has pushed the frame even wider as he completes the first cycle of a series in Denmark,
titled Sightings and Encounters, which involves the staging of mysterious events. These events are inspired by
the landscapes and locales in and around three small Danish towns in Jutland, on the North Sea, and have drawn
locals into the creation of these works with somewhat undefined endpoints. The first starting point (The Beach)
is a cold, Scotland-facing shoreline of a land mass called Doggerland, replete with stones and sandy cliffs.
Drawing from news accounts about whales having washed up on the beach, but also the prehistory of the place,
which was for some reason spared the last Ice Age, McGillis, “started to imagine what this area was like before
anyone was there.” This line of reasoning evolved to create a ‘happening’ of sorts, which created an opening for
the examination or celebration of an occurrence on the beach, a kind of full-sized diorama in collaboration with
townspeople. The artistic outcome may be an image, but then too, it exists in people’s memories. “You walk
down the beach and you see something on the horizon and you want to examine it,” McGillis says. These
artifacts and experiences act as pieces of a puzzle coming together in the mind of the viewer.
Cut to an interior shot, the hallway of an elementary school in the second town. At the end of the hall, what was
once a bright window is now the backlit display of the skeletal remains of…something. This second event (The
Hall) has a sanctified feel, and remained on display in the school, with little context offered to the children.
This ambiguity seems to be the locus of McGillis’ work, a battle between control and chance, leveraging existing
elements as the nucleus for the crystallization of new ideas and structures, ultimately creating things which
oscillate between two different states: mythology and science, nature and artifice, life and death, reality and…
another, deeper reality, one which perhaps cannot be agreed upon universally, but invites a universal sort of
interest and curiosity.
Rosie Sharp, April 2015
Copyright 2015 Essay'd
Wake, 2006, Wood, paint, 95'
Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, Minnesota
Image courtesy of the artist
Reckoning a Peripheral Wilderness, 2012, Cardboard, phragmites reeds, plastic, mixed materials
Public Pool, Hamtramck, Michigan
Images courtesy of the artist
Blast Fishermen, Semporna, Malaysia, 2003, Mattress, polyester resin, mixed media, 20” x 16” x 9”
Images courtesy of the artist
Your Back to the Woods, 2014, Salvaged plastic, steel, wood, video
Image courtesy of the artist
Gypsy Moth Defoliation and Cell Tower, Shenandoah, Virginia, 2003
Mattress, fleece jacket, mixed media, 24” x 24” x 9”
Image courtesy of the artist
The Beach, Fjaltring, Denmark 2015
Image courtesy of the artist
The Hall, Ryde, Denmark 2015
Images courtesy of the artist