Carol Anne McChrystal

Born into the dual diaspora of the two island nations of Ireland and the Philippines, Carol Anne McChrysta’s sculptures have been exhibited in Los Angeles at Mata Gallery, Avenue 50 Studios, and Adjunct Positions, and internationally at D21 Kunstraum (Leipzig) and Horse & Pony, (Berlin). She has participated in several residency programs including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, and Burren College of Art and her arts writing has been published on platforms like ArPractical. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Mozaik Foundation Ecosystem X, an award which recognizes artists using contemporary art as a medium for social change. Carol Anne received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and she is currently based on unceded Tongva land, where she also organizes with GABRIELA, the progressive Filipino women’s group.

Carol Anne McChrystal’s materially-driven sculpture practice uses chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting the tension between Earth’s immense history and the absurdly mundane everyday experience of plastic, her practice consolidates the painstakingly hand-made with mass-produced consumables in order to pry open a speculative space in which to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.

Her recent sculptures concentrate on the ancestral handicrafts of her two island homelands of Ireland and the Philippines. Influenced by time spent in familial homelands witnessing the role that globalized industry plays in the dissolution of cultural practices, these works take the form of plaited floor mats traditionally made from local plant fibers. Informed by constructs of home and her own family migration story, she hand-weaves these objects from non-traditional materials like blue tarpaulins, single-use beverage bottles, discarded plastic wrappers and other products of oil extraction that she collects from specific landscapes. Using material and method hand in hand, these works are a meditation on how extractive industry and climate catastrophe impact local experiences of home and shelter.

Having worked with various materials, privileged ideas over objects, and engaged with texts on the dissolution of the tangible aspects of art, artists Leslie de Chavez, Jason Dy, SJ, W. Don Flores, and Carol Anne McChrystal, in their group exhibition THE RIDDLE OF MATERIALS, search for critical dialogue through their affinity with their materials.

The works in the exhibition demonstrate an engagement with materials in symbolic parallels, across intuitive levels, along environmental scale, or the semiotic plane, revealing their making as “a process of correspondence” (Ingold, The Materials of Life, 2016). In these artists’ works, we recognize a giving of due to raw material substance and the processes of becoming; opening up potential for image-making and making-meaning—an alchemical proposal that materials that cannot be treated as immaterial, linear, or static. (AM+DG 2022)

Exhibit

The Riddle of Materials