And what relation does the work at hand have to the artist's signature? Consider that all these works are facsimiles of a single series of marks made by the artist. From a scribble on a page, traced to a screen, backlit, flat, titled "drawingsmall.pdf," the works in the gallery are iterations of an original not present. Where is it? The inferred avant-text is repeated in the curve and gesture of every work, a guide adhered to across new materials. The happenstance of its shape is a diagram gone, rendered now in the techniques of sculpture and painting. The digital is the context for this production as a delay in the on/off of an original mark and its later re-constitution away from the page, the sketchbook, and realized through new processes more distant from McKenna's own hand.
What kind of subject is the artist—shadows skirting her works—whose iterations in the gallery suggest that original diagram not present, differed in its mediation? She is not the painter reaching with the prosthetic brush in a figurative gesture (There was a regime in the imposition of belief, fetish; the relinquishing of representation was a leap of faith, an emboldened religiosity granted by the warmth of a spiritual departure into form. The authentic event of the application of a mark referent only of itself, of a primary molding into form of matter, is rendered virtual here, an earlier convention still ghosting the artist's work). A different act, that of Penelope, who weaves and unweaves
any tapestry, the work of refiguring and articulating anew, not in the figuration of her self, or in a search for mark, but for form, for process. Waiting as the sculpture of a gerund searching.
Searching completed–searchedness–objects are created and stand or hang before us. In McKenna's work, presence, the signature, the brushstroke, the hand of the painter, the shove, lift, and touch of the sculptor is now withdrawn, reciprocal to the machine's cut and the copier's tracing. A bard sang the event of weaving and unweaving. The blueprint of scribble is spoken into space as a vanishing point of relation between the parts here now. Lit as the sun falls, is falling, fallenness. This paused system of rhyming artworks cast moving shadows of duration. This event, the staging of the works by time, speaks not to the pureness of "relation" but to how they are relat-ing, or did relate. The artist names "relatedness": the conceptualization of a past process of being brought into relation staged as a presence in the noun-form, a theatre of the grammar of pieces as parts (the true diagram), set on the grey gradient stage, and constituting a vanished scribble between them.
- words by Joseph Lubitz