YourHartford.com

YH Magazine Meets Sam McKinniss

SAM McKINNISS - FIERCE DOUBT

NBMAA - NEW/NOW - Aug. 8 – Oct. 12, 2008

BIO

Sam McKinniss was born in 1985 in Northfield Minnesota, but moved to Connecticut shortly after. In 2007, he received a BFA from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, where he studied painting under Stephen Brown and Carol Padberg. Also in 2007, McKinniss won the prestigious GO! emerging artist contest at Real Art Ways in Hartford. His solo exhibition TRUE LOVE is on view at Real Art Ways this summer. His work rarely strays from portraiture, exploring themes related to desire, love, pop music, the male gaze, and the history of painting. FIERCE DOUBT is McKinniss’ first museum show. He currently lives and works in Hartford, Connecticut.

http://sammckinniss.com

For the same reasons why sad songs are the best pop songs, unrequited love is the best love because it incites the most intensely felt emotion. A portrait inspires this kind of one-sided desire, the kind that hurts so badly even though you can’t get enough.

MORE AFTER PHOTO:

I am not looking to capture any subject and I am opposed to any other such violent nonsense. I am opposed to the privileged status that male portrait painters historically have enjoyed. Instead, I am looking to be captured by another’s beguiling image as many times as it takes to never be satisfied.

The purpose of these works is to fully exercise my inability to capture any subject, no matter how accurately I can render one’s likeness. The thought that I might literally capture with a portrait or in some way own another person is ludicrous. I can not hold on to anybody. I have chased each sitter with my gaze and they have momentarily succumbed to my advances. Thus each painting is a failed attempt at love; that is, a failed attempt at holding onto another human being. At best, they are emotionally exacting, flat representations of real people. The representations themselves are painfully unreal. The only real thing present is the heartbreak experienced after knowing how deceptive this illusion truly is. I want to cast doubt on notions of true love, the gay experience, the male gaze, and the practice of illusionist (realist) painting itself.

“There's a portrait
In a back room,
Which I keep for days upon, which I relent
And gaze for hours on the muscle skin and bone of some
Imaginary friend.”

-Belle & Sebastian, Slow Graffiti, 1998