A View from the Inside Out
empathy and community through discovery and skill sharing

A View is a mentor-mentee program that includes broader community activities and advocacy work on healthy labor practices and policies. The mentor-mentee teams work independantly on their chosen art project, with a focus on skill sharing and transitioning the mentee to a mentor role. I connect Baltimore residents with artists working in photography, painting, book making, performance, time-lapse animations, installations, etc.

The independant teams also meet collectively to discuss, build, and host community-wide activities that engage neighbors, collegues, family, visitors. These activities can be participatory performances, interactive installations, murals, or exhibitions.

Finally, A View listens to participants hopes, concerns, experiences, and fears about their work and identity. This ear to the ground informs follow-up economic research and advocacy work for healthier labor practices. The research is shared with the general public, project partners, and policy makers to help increase awareness, empower citizens, and shape healthy labor practices. Outputs include info or motion graphcs, interactive timelines, op-eds, policy proposals.

A View is currently Baltimore based, examining ways to train others to be able to build  similar projects in other cities and internationally.

I had the opportunity to exhibit at the Notre Dame of Maryland University Fall 2018. I organized three "chapters' using the themes cowboy, wrestler, dictator. Each chapter began with photographs that I made in years past and ended with images that I selected from research into tangents from each starting point. Cowboy (Ft Worth Stockyards 1987) became a look at historical roles cowboys played in developing the West, masculinity and male archeotypes, ending with a look at the current US-Mexican border debate. Wrestler (Johnny Angel, amateur wrestler photographed 1982/3) became a survey of how we define and measure the value of work. Dictator (images from Lenin's summer home outside of [then] Leningrad 1982) became a look at Soviet propoganda photos, ending with a look at fake news and alt facts today.

As well as the exhibition, I hosted a participatory theater event: A Parlor Game in the Library. Participants followed instructions to complete tasks, then listened to four guests’ thoughts on the value of labor, followed by Q&As while sharing a cake decorated with edible statistics on the value of unpaid work. Speakers included Heather Carpenter (economist), Chrysalinn Archie (Gift Economy), Ademar Bechtold (economist), Stephanie Geller (Community Organizer). Hosted by Notre Dame of Maryland University.

The press release stated: Bruce McKaig's practice explores the power of images to reshape realities, sometimes juxtaposing antiquated techniques or objects with contemporary themes and issues. This exhibition, organized around three series -- the cowboy, the wrestler, and the dictator -- combines McKaig's own artworks with curated images and materials that explore some of the historical and current cultural and socio-economic relationships between photography and those themes.

My undergraduate (BA Austin College 1981) and graduate degrees (MSFS Georgetown University, with Distinction, 1986) are in Economics. This training informs some of my practice. I sometimes juxtapose antiquated techniques or objects with contemporary themes and issues. Examples include a zoetrope on climate change, a photo standin on income inequality, an edible pie chart on ethics in funding.
 
Kenneth Roth writes, “The global rise of populism is a dangerous threat to democracy and human rights. Many people feel left behind by the global economy, and growing inequality.” Naomi Klein adds, ““People have lost their sense of security and identity under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization and corporate trade.” George Monbiot links this loss to “mental illness, anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness.”
 
In the arts, Barry Kehoe specifies: ”One must wade through a fog of mythology surrounding concepts of genius, colonial appropriation, and social Darwinism.” A similar “fog of mythology” cloaks contemporary econometrics. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) persists as the definitive measure of well-being. Whereas GDP quantifies economic activity, it cannot frame such activity within individual or communal values. A train wreck that results in death, hospitalizations, and lawsuits increases GDP.
 
Thinking about  what constitutes "Art" (A fake want-ad offering to end someone's debt? A barter network?) helps me examine and promote New Economy thoughts on what constitutes well-being. Social practice, community based, new genre public art join the world of painting and ballet. Local currency, worker owned, B-Corps, and barter networks join the world of profit maximization and contract labor.

I used a 2002 grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to produce my first animation on DVD of a fictitious tour guide twirling and traveling through photographs that I made from different locales around the world. Since the project was publicly funded, I wanted to give the result back to the public. I produced 1000 DVDs of the work and gave them away for free to people on the streets in DC.

I learned a lot from the face-to-face time with people on the streets so I continued to produce works for projections or public performances. This choice coincided with more collaborations with other visual artists, audio artists, historians, and eventually I started participatory performance work where the "audience" plays an active role in semi-guided, semi-scripted experiences that blur distinctions between performer and viewer.

My initial time based works were mute and built entirely from still photographs. After the privilege of working with sound artist Adrienne Penebre, I began to add video files and sound tracks. Some of the time-based works have been screened at the Phillips Collection, the Art Museum of the Americas, Gallery Project (Ann Arbor), the Hungarian Multicultural Center (Budapest), et al.

For a 2006 exhibition of works from Time Markers, Andy Grundberg wrote: McKaig is less interested in the science or economics of how we move through time than he is fascinated by visual representations that encompass human presence and its shadowy other, absence. Part of what animates his work is a sense of temporality that one might interpret in terms of mortality.

The economics of how "we move through time" came to play a larger role in my practice since these works.

Since 1987, I have been layering cutouts, leaves, rocks, body parts over pieces of paper as I print in the darkroom. These images use my archive of negatives as starting points for stories that turn any documentation into prose. It is a celebration of photography's capacity to invent over its capacity to document.

Gelatin silver prints in ambient light are produced with the inherently chaotic nature of light, a brut and rudimentary exploration of picture-less photography embracing, not avoiding, elements of chance and surprise. The images involve no optics, no camera, no darkroom, working only with the primary elements of photography: silver gelatin paper, chemicals, light.  The paper is exposed, over hours or days, directly to ambient indoor/outdoor light and chemistry is applied by pouring, dripping, patting, splattering, splashing, brushing. Materials and gestures that are distinct and sequential in conventional photography here confront each other all at once and over and over.  Treated this way, the silver develops not in black and white but in a multitude of colors.  The resulting image is the very object exposed to light, without intermediary, like Daguerreotypes and other photographic processes that engender neither negative nor copy. The one-of-a-kind results are a mixture of my control and the force of natural elements: part prediction and part discovery. It is material photography, as in materialism, the doctrine that the only or fundamental reality is physical matter and that all beings, processes, and phenomena are manifestations of matter.

Images from this series have been exhibited at Galerie Lambert (Paris), the Kathleen Ewing Gallery (DC), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), et al. The Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris) purchased eight Ambient Light images between 1992 and 1996.

1988 - present

In January 1988, I left Washington DC to spend six months in Mexico.  Instead, I traveled through Mexico and arrived in Guatemala where I lived for two years, traveling at times as far south as Ecuador.  In 1991, I returned to Guatemala for two more years.  I lived in a small Tzutuhil village, San Pedro La Laguna, in the mountains to the west of Guatemala by Lake Atitlan.  Over these formative years, I worked extensively with hand coloring and began making pinhole and stereo photographs. The first stereo photographs were made by bolting two cameras together.  The first pinhole photographs were made from powdered milk cans.
 
Since 1988, I have been printing the Latin American negatives and coloring the photographs with watercolor or pencil.  As of 2008, I have accumulated over three hundred one-of-a-kind photographs. There are more negatives to be printed. Parts of this series are in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, El Centro Nationale Para la Proteccion de la Antigua in Guatemala, and La Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris.  Parts have been exhibited at El Convento de Santa Clara, Anitqua Guatemala, Georgetown University, Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Le Faste Fou (Paris), Palais de Tokyo Museum (Paris).

In February 2001, I made a pinhole camera out of a 10-gallon galvanized steel trashcan. The slow exposures explain the absence of movement and activity in many scenes.  The trashcan camera produces 16"x20" paper negatives that are contact printed for the final 20”x24” silver gelatin prints.  The first two years of work produced cityscapes of Washington DC.  Eventually, I began transporting the trashcan camera to the countryside in nearby Virginia and Maryland.  Some of the resulting landscapes are panoramic, many are up-close compositions approached like still lifes.
 
I also used the trashcan camera to photograph perception drawings from psychology studies about vision and perception. Materials taken from science and the arts are scanned onto transparencies that are photographed with the pinhole trashcan. In psychology, the drawings and their questions are ostensibly presented in a “visually neutral” format, inviting viewers to form conclusions about how we see. In these pinhole photographs, the blatant visual qualities – vignetting, distortion -- render any insights transparent, dysfunctional, humorous, raising more questions than answers. That work made me curious about process in a vast sense so I expanded the subject matter to consider, from beginning to end, how a photograph is materially made (creation), seen (perception), and understood (cognition). Sample subjects include medical scans of the eye,  sheet music, cave drawings, Renaissance paintings, cookie cutters, dials, graphs and data sheets from Kodak how-to books, a Chipotle napkin.