Sam McKinniss could be called a great painter of modern life, if we were to assume that life is still modern. It might be more precise to describe McKinniss as a great painter of contemporary reality. His work examines the mediated image, representing the “reality” people participate in through social media rather than through direct experience.

For Law and order, McKinniss has gathered an array of source images of law breakers and law enforcers from both fictional films and news photographs. Paintings of A list and D list celebrities are complemented by “location shots” and an image of an escaped Highland bull from his local Kent, Connecticut news blog. A small painting of Alcatraz looms large as a potent American symbol of so-called corrections. The artist has conceived of his exhibition almost as a storyboard. Rather than a conventional press release, we are reproducing McKinniss’s exhibition proposal, written like a film treatment. It provides a vivid presentation of the artist’s concept.

There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate’s sake.

(W.H. Auden, exc. There will be no peace, 1956)

Exhibition plan

Law and order is another exhibition for the immediate moment. It arrives fresh on the heels of my last one in January, The perfect tense, at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, accompanied as it was by uncontrollable natural disaster. I had intended the pictures, made alone in my studio before the fires started, to explore private grief turned around toward the public domain. In and out of LA, the subsequent months have proved crueler, more violent, and increasingly depressing. American politics drill down on the people with exceptional torque. We’re really in it now and despite my reminiscence there is no turning back.

This is another show about how ubiquitous strong images seem to compensate for losses suffered in this era of persistent decline. I tweak them just so in the paint. Here in the middle of something terrifying and dumb, galling and unworkable, I look to the prevalent imagery in search of themes and depictions, for ways to discover exactly what the situation feels like. These are painted “renditions” of criminals, politicians, folk heroes, escaped livestock and one zoo animal, from a distance or in close-up. Pictured also are two infamous prisons. One is currently active yet largely kept out of view in rural Louisiana. The other is defunct yet popular as a tourist attraction in San Francisco Bay. The current American President wants to reactivate the tourism prison because he understands that representation is essentially abstract, nowhere near as spectacular as threats made good on the ground. This, as well as his TV resumé, and certainly without compliment of much grace or finesse, make him a kind of performance art star par excellence: hell-bent on reality and insane for the literal, and at scale.

Thus we are subject to new forms of tyranny from the vantage of a wholly untenable worldview. The work of Law and order is to locate, trace, and otherwise describe the parameters of that topdown worldview, to achieve a pictorial scenario spread across gallery walls wherein life may genuinely express itself in spite of the circumstances.