Corey McCorkle

Born in 1969 in La Crosse (US)
Lives and works in New York (US)

  

Heiligenschein

2004
Wall installation, wood and natural light
Diameter: 2 m
Purchased in: 2009

The terse wall label describes the technique with paradoxical eloquence: “wood and light.” Nothing else. And yet, wood is only a material support. The inscription might just as well read: “void and light.” The most minimal works are sometimes the most impressive. The fascinating, hypnotizing, luminous circle, afloat in the air, has been obtained by a simple beveled cut in the partition placed in front of a window. The particular angle of the incision is enough to produce an effect of condensation and refraction of natural light, and turn this aperture into a radiant outburst. Before becoming an artist, the American Corey McCorkle studied architecture. His background is undoubtedly responsible for his interest in history, in all its forms, and specifically in its erudite inquiry into vague and even contradictory areas where architecture brings together modernity and tradition, functionality and ornamentation, naturalism and industry. By refusing disciplinary confinement, McCorkle defies the idea of separating esthetic realms, aiming rather to create situations and objects that are ambivalent, complex, and indeterminate in their objectives and in their style. Similarly, he likes to re-employ artisan techniques (inlaid woodwork, carpentry, or even wine-making, for example), in a way that they retain their diverse cultural roots. Like multi-layered concepts. McCorkle’s architectural, sculptural, photographic, and cinematic interventions are backed by thoroughly documented research combining historical, psychedelic, political, ecological, and esoteric references, while their formal appearance always remains non-discursive, abstract, and poetical. And always extremely simple. In this context, the installation Heiligenschein produces perceptual upheaval through the juxtaposition, within a minimal spatial intervention, of knowledge and magic, aura and technology. The circle—an elementary geometric form, as well as a solar and divine metaphor—conjures up a mystical dimension alongside an exemplary artistic economy, one could even say ecology, through its capacity to create the maximum effect with minimum means. It creates impressions that vary from persistence of vision to optical illusion, from magnetism to dizziness, from appearance to disappearance (it grows faint, and vanishes completely when one focuses on it intensely). The sensational competes here with the rudimentary. The title, which in German means “a sacred aura,” alludes to a holy light and to a specific optical phenomenon, namely the halo created by the refraction of light surrounding a body. Playing with the timelessness of forms and with shifts between epochs and geographies, between the supernatural and the spectacular, McCorkle’s work is a point of convergence for the a-priori rational and pragmatic minimal art and the auratic properties of the material. By means of their fundamental indetermination, the most elementary forms are often the source of the greatest complexity. Moreover, the purely “natural,” and even naturalistic character of the work entails its instability, even biological precariousness, since it radiates upon contact with light and, conversely, gradually wanes with nightfall… in order to come back to life time and time again.

_{Guillaume Désanges}

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