Songs from the Sky, by Patrick McGuan
May 31 to August 16, 2025
About the exhibit
Lately I’ve been working around how language is grafted onto bodies and landscapes and the ways they react to its inscription. I think of form and material as language-made-tangible with a grammar to be teased apart, and I look for the spaces between the object and the name, between meaning and use.
The material vocabulary in Lyric is drawn from Rustbelt Catholicism and country music. The common denominator I see is a collision of grace and labor. Here someone hopes that a songwriter with a tenuous connection to reality has composed a song of bird names that somehow is not about birds. In moments of affliction, what remains to bind words to meaning? How far can subject drift from content—how does the shade of the frontier remain consistent even as it rewrites the landscape it purports to describe?
In the Dry focuses on utopian and apocalyptic thought in colonial America and the legacy of these attitudes in the climate crisis. At the fringes of religious thought, Shakerism and the theology of Hildegard von Bingen offer alternatives to the puritanical logic of dominion. Shaker craft and spiritual gift drawings along with Hildegard’s visionary cosmology hold space for the divine as something green, growing, and feminine. In counterbalance to our current moment, they frame labor as worship and proffer interdependence and caregiving in place of individuality.
The Shaker design maxim, every force evolves a form, seems the most capacious description of sculpture I’ve found. But what is the form then shaped by grief and hope, constitution and dissolution? A spiral, the pilgrim’s labyrinth, a path for those moments when definitions and syntax fail at description or refuse to walk an idea forward in a straight line. Contradiction and confusion become a means of navigation. Error and indeterminacy open up fissures in the narratives of modernity. Looking through them, we can find space for those unruly and persistent voices that remind us that the past is still present and that no story lives alone. Empathy without self-interest starts in a similar place outside of linear comprehension. Maybe it’s learning to listen for new languages without expecting to understand, or as Simone Weil wrote, …not to try to interpret them, but to look at them until the light suddenly dawns.
About the artist
Patrick McGuan was baptized in a ship’s bell and has spent much of life drifting around the Midwest. They work between sculpture, performance, and experimental writing to explore the ways language is grafted onto bodies and landscapes, the connections between labor and ecological history, visionary and devotional art, and the confusions of incarnation. Patrick taught at Syracuse University for four years and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska.