EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Park McArthur
Engaged in a primarily sculptural way of making art, I am curious about and attracted to materials such as municipal parking signage, large blocks of polyurethane foam, and latex prophylactics piled inside stainless steel plinth-as-containers. I am interested in how these forms and materials (and the presentation of them as art) attempts to share the indivisible connections between aesthetics and everyday life. The portable ramps in "Ramps," for example, were all initiated through a process familiar to many disabled people: engaging a place by asking if it is accessible then finding a way to try to make it more accessible. Or the image "How to get a wheelchair over sand," for example, shows materials laid across sand to make a campfire area more traversable in one way. Although the social and practical dimension of making art varies from piece to piece, I am consistently interested in finding ways of understanding debility and dependency as a generative space. As such, my work often comes from personal experience, but seeks to arrive (or join) a space that exceeds the individual person.
