Songs from the Sky, by Patrick McGuan
May 31 to August 16, 2025
About the exhibit
Lately I’ve been working on how language is grafted onto bodies and landscapes, and the ways they react. I think of form and material as language-made-tangible with a grammar to be teased apart, and I look for the spaces between object and name, between meaning and use.
The material vocabulary in Lyric is drawn from Rustbelt Catholicism and country music. The common denominator 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 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?
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 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 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 fissures in the narratives of modernity. Looking through them, we find unruly voices that remind us the past is present and no story lives alone. Maybe it’s learning to listen for new languages without expecting to understand or, as Simone Weil wrote, not to “… interpret them, but to look at them until the light suddenly dawns.” Many thanks to Jeremy Tarr, Mary DiPrete, Carl Voss, Deya Guy-Vasson, Julia Wilson, Katlyn Brumfield, Daisy Wiley, Ellery Bryan, Patrick Costello, Austin Riddle, Ann Clarke, Jessi Li, Becky Sellinger, Sam Quinn, Andy Vanderyacht, Sam Gilvarg, Janet Soto Sanamiego, Alexis Linnebach, Turner McGehee, and Sayward, Beth, and John Schoonmaker. Thank you to Emily Zangle, Julia Banfi, Donna Lamb, Maria Welych, and the rest of the staff at Stone Quarry and the Schweinfurth.
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.