Isabelle Frances McGuire: Year Zero

Across a growing body of work, Isabelle Frances McGuire turns to figures that loom large in the cultural imagination or those that keep reappearing, sometimes against all odds, whether a president and moral exemplar such as Abraham Lincoln, classic monsters like Frankenstein, or the fame-destined ingénue of A Star is Born, a movie that has been remade many times. McGuire embraces these apparent archetypes and the stories they keep generating, often giving them a new uncanny life or a kind of feral energy.

McGuire’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society began by thinking about the lasting lionization of Lincoln and the symbolic relics associated with him, but it expands from there to thinking about other origin stories and different forms of re-enactment. Picking up on the looping repetitions and regressions in today’s culture and politics—populated by characters both real and imagined—McGuire tests out different approaches to recreating the past, re-animating old models, or revisiting persistent symbols.

On a material level, McGuire’s work takes shape as technology meets and mediates history’s lingering specters, especially in their pop culture guises. With the learn-it-and-do-it spirit of an engineer, the Chicago-based artist creates sculptures, installations, and props for videos using technologies such as 3D printing and computer-controlled milling based on digital models. At times, McGuire also uses DIY methods like “modding” and “kitbashing,” in which existing models are altered or combined to make new forms, borrowing techniques from gaming culture as readily as from the history of art.

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, Texas) lives and works in Chicago. Selected solo and two person presentations include What Pipeline (Detroit, MI), King’s Leap (New York, NY), Scherben (Berlin, DE), Mickey (Chicago, IL), Good Weather at Et al. (San Francisco, CA), From The Desk of Lucy Bull (Los Angeles, CA), and Prairie (Chicago, IL). Recent group shows include High Art & Sister (Seoul, KR), Artists Space (New York, NY), Petzel Gallery (New York, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), Bel Ami (Los Angeles, CA), shore (Vienna, AT), M. LeBlanc (Chicago, IL), In Lieu (Los Angeles, CA), and Alyssa Davis Gallery (New York, NY).

Friends of Isabelle Frances McGuire Patron Circle: Murat Ahmed & Katherine Mackenzie, and Zach Smith.

Major annual support for the Ren is provided by the Mellon Foundation. Ren programs are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Annual support is provided by The Provost’s Discretionary Fund at the University of Chicago.