McKee Gallery presents new work by Vija Celmins.

In an interview with PBS’ Art 21 Celmins explains,

when I picked those set of rocks in New Mexico, it never even occurred to me… I had them in the back of the car and I put them out on the table and I just had this instinctive desire to make them myself as if I was maybe a creator myself. To make them myself, to see how close I could get, like a test or something, like a discipline. And then they became other things as I worked on them.

With this bit of knowledge I can make connections between many of the pieces in the gallery. The table with bronze cast gun, the handmade globes and even the prints of spider webs and galaxies.  Although her work appears illusionistic, her interests surpass this pursuit .  She is interested in their surfaces and in how to make her own version of them – what she calls “re-describing…through my body and through my sensibility, through everything I know really.”  And in doing so she creates a third object.  Her cast blackboard is not a functional duplicate of a blackboard and it is not a prop or a stand-in for a blackboard – it is simply what it is – bronze painted with acrylic, alkyd oil, and pastel.

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