Cathy McClure

In 1999, for her first museum solo exhibition, McClure produced a three-part zoetropic installation for the exhibition ‘Team Works' at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In one part of the installation, McClure arranged her silver, copper, brass, and steel abstracted human figures on spinning metal disks which were lit by strobe lights. These figures were described by art critic David Bonetti as "miniature grandchildren of Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer's mechano-morphic sculptures.”[15] McClure's theatrical scene was enhanced by raucous carnival music, creating a "visual and aural three-ring circus that scares and delights equally.”[15]

Another of McClure's zoetropic installations, ‘People Doing Things, Shiny Objects, Great Color, Occasional Music', was included in the Bellevue Arts Museum's Pacific Northwest Annual in 2000 where McClure won Best in Show. The installation's ambiance was furthered by "old-time theater seats, red velvet curtains, and vaudeville music.” Its centerpiece was "a spinning mirrored object around which little figures cartwheel and flip and have televisions dropped on their heads, all intensified by colored lights and strobes.”[16][17]

In her 2007 exhibition ‘Menagerie' at Neuhoff Edelman Gallery, New York, McClure introduced her signature ‘Bots' to her carnivalesque zoetropic installation, '3 Ring Circus'. McClure created her ‘Bots' by deconstructing commercially available plush toys - mechanical elephants, hippos, roosters and other animals. She removed the stuffing from the toys, reconfigured their mechanical components, cast them in metal, and installed them on pedestals. Village Voice critic R.C. Baker noted, "The installation of three zoetropes featured ear-flapping, trunk-waving elephants slowly circling stainless-steel Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds—the flashing strobe lights and minor-key music leavened big-eyed cuteness with glitzy dystopia.”[18][19]

Mass-produced plush mechanical toys also served as the inspiration and original form for the kinetic sculptures McClure included in ‘Remains', her exhibition at New York's Moss Gallery in 2009.[20] McClure's ‘half-whimsical, half-disturbing animals' stripped of their coats and stuffing were cast in bronze, their inner mechanisms intact but exposed, McClure altered the toys' sound and movement controls.[21]

McClure's ‘Bots' sculptures reveal her fascination with the hidden, inner-workings of mechanical toys meant to be appreciated for their outsides. The artist remarked in an interview with the Seattle Times, "I was really interested in what I felt that was underneath,” she said. "It's like uncovering an object that wasn't intended to be seen in the first place, that has a beautiful design.”[22][23] The sculptures' metal finishes make evident McClure's background in and appreciation for metalsmithing processes. Noting her evolution from her artistic origins in traditional metalsmithing, in a review of her ‘Remains' exhibition published in ‘Metalsmith' magazine, Bruce Metcalf proposed that McClure's ‘Bots' keep the craft of metalworking relevant -- McClure deploys a new set of strategies and addresses a new set of contexts to show how contemporary metalsmiths "can move people in a different way."[24]

In a lecture given at Rhode Island School of Design in 2018, Murray Moss discussed McClure's ‘Bots' noting, "Through metamorphosis they seem to have aged, even wizened…Their new bronze bodies are reductive, sleek, no longer toys concerned with pleasing the viewer, they are robotic creatures of [McClure's] own vision.”[8]

In 2011, Washington's Bellevue Arts Museum organized a solo exhibition of McClure's work.[25] Titled ‘Midway', a reference to the traveling carnivals McClure attended as a child, the exhibition was the artist's largest installation to date, complete with music, whirling lights, futuristic, mechanized toys, a 10' Ferris wheel and working carousel.[26] McClure's ‘Bots' featured in the exhibition included mechanical ‘Elmo' and ‘Mickey Mouse' toys "stripped of their commercial identities” and reconfigured by the artist to engage in repetitive motions, which "conjure dreamy cinematic operations and allude to a modern life characterized by escapism, frenzy and consumption."[27] Curator Nora Atkinson remarked, "Midway evokes a fusion of adult and childhood fantasy with somber undertones as though the artist's creatures have run too long unchecked. It speaks of the coming and going of people/fads/phases, of displacement and discontentedness in the modern world, and of being lost in between."[27]

For 'Mickey Hardwired', McClure's 2013 exhibition at Moss Bureau, New York, the artist gathered and arranged an army of mechanical Mickey Mouse toys from which the recognizable, soft outer layer and inner voice mechanisms had been eliminated by the artist. Rewired by McClure to move initially in near-perfect unison, the skeletal Mickeys eventually collide with one another, creating a scene which devolves into whirring, ratcheting, chaos.[28] McClure also presented her mechanical Mickey Mouse forms in an exhibition at Method Gallery, Seattle.[29]

McClure sources the majority of the toys she uses for her sculptures from thrift stores, which has made her acutely aware of the abundance of cast-off and discarded products which may eventually end up in landfills. The artist's sculptures, videos, and installations highlight this "societal penchant for over-consumption and over-production.”[29] In a review published in ‘Vanguard Seattle',T.s. Flock writes of McClure's ‘Bots', "It's hard to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds when there is demand for cheap thrills whose plastic corpses will be polluting the oceans long after we're dead. That's not the future we were promised, and these bots are part of the lie. McClure's work reminds us that we are still being duped through with an uncanny tension between sentimentality and waste.”[30]

In her work, McClure also considers the discrepancy between America's idealized dream of a technology-filled future and the reality of our increasingly digital lives.[31] For the artist's 2017 solo exhibition, ‘Dispossessed' held at the Center on Contemporary Art, McClure sourced used mechanical toys and covered some in gold-leaf, to bring a new attention and value to the toys' existence at a time when there is an evident shift away from physical play toward digital forms of engagement and stimuli occurring.[31] For McClure, the tentative status of toys in the digital era is a metaphor for our own uncertain future.[30]

In 2020 McClure displayed her installation 'Re-Imagineering' at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, and in 2021 at the Texas Tech University, School of Art Studio + Folio Gallery, McClure's alma mater in Lubbock, Texas. These exhibitions included the fourth and fifth incarnations of McClure's 'Mickey Hardwired' installation.[32][10]