STEVEN MACGOWAN
MacGowan, 41, has lived most of his life in small Michigan towns; he now resides in Sodus. His present direction dates from 1984, when he saw a painted wood carving of a western scene at an art fair; afterward he sought out wood-carvers for instruction. He begins with photographs taken on trips to New York and Chicago, then makes a drawing that’s usually a composite of several photos. The wood panel he begins with is typically made of two-inch-thick butternut boards laminated together. He transfers his drawing to the surface and begins carving. Afterward he applies other materials to give each surface a realistic texture, often using glue and sand he collects and strains, separating it into different sizes. In other places he attacks the wood with sandpaper and a hammer. He then paints the work, and finally applies things like crushed glass and small pieces of paper.
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Choice, No Choice shows the passageway under an overpass. A stone wall and two benches run along the passageway, the benches carved and painted to suggest wood grain (MacGowan first had to cover the underlying wood with multiple coats of gesso to hide its natural grain). The cracks in the sidewalk are real cracks carved in the wood. Under one of the benches are two pieces of white paper and an empty chips bag, rendered in relief; two straws are similarly sculpted, so that there are tiny shadows where they meet the pavement.
If this is a street in which the wind can blow, it is surely a street in which humans walk. Each little scrap evokes the unseen being who left it there–the newspaper, the chips bag, the broken glass all seem more alive, and oddly more human, than the faces in countless mediocre portraits. One recalls the great late-19th-century American trompe l’oeil painters William Harnett and John Peto, who carefully arranged books, letters, or a table setting to create a human drama.
There is a kind of hierarchy in MacGowan’s work. Smooth, clean geometric surfaces are the least evocative; products of the human hand, such as graffiti, the most suggestive. Artifacts like chips wrappers are somewhere in between. Also in between, but powerful, are areas of decay that become stories in themselves. Pieces of brick and mortar are missing from the wall in Armour, and two pipes running up it are almost completely exposed. These exposed pipes and empty spaces (created by indentations in the surface) have the vividness of some great, now past human drama.
