Eventually, my passion for art and my background in economics merged to examine socioeconomic issues and ethical labor practices. For my first public art project (2001), I produced 1000 DVDs of an animation and gave them away on the streets. In 2002, I first depicted labor through art using pinhole and time-lapse techniques to document workers on the job. Since 2015, I have built a barter network between artists and tradespeople (Trade4Art), and organized one-on-one meetings between artists and unemployed residents (Creative Baltimore Fund).

I was a participant in Santa Fe Art Institute's Equal Justice Residency (July 2018). I had conversations with academics, graveyard-shift security guards, and homeless residents, whose hopes, fears, and fate overlapped on the recently abandoned campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Other works I include in this project are from an exhibition at Notre Dame of Maryland Univsity: A Picture is Worth a Thousand workers: the Cowboy, the Wrestler, the Dictator. The exhibit included participatory installation and performance works, co-ordinated with the NDMU's Business and Economics Department.

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. 

This series was part of my transition from a solitary art practice to public art and community-based projects. Working with models – friends, neighbors, the mailman – was the invitation to open the process to other people’s presence and persona. I completed the images with techniques that produce one-of-a-kind results, like the models.

I came. I saw. I manipulated.
 
The process is simple: lay something on top of something else (in front of a car), like photograms, another process I have explored for years. It’s about spaces, how we shape them, perceive them, in terms of identity, status in this case, mostly screen spaces, and the spaces of memory. Photography is both pushed in front of the camera and pasted on after the camera. Source files for each image are visual notes from my archive of travels.