JENNIFER AND KEVIN MCCOY
SPECIAL THINGS / SCARY THINGS


Exhibition Dates: September 9 - October 7, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, September 8, from 6 - 8 PM



For their first solo Los Angeles exhibition, the McCoys present two new works. Both pieces are inspired by the language and themes of childhood.

In the upstairs gallery, their project Special Things explores a super-charged utopian childhood of cavorting lambs, romping youths, and chiffon rainbows. All of this is rendered sculpturally in fragments across sixteen small hanging sculptures. Each sculpture consists of a miniature scene, a small video camera, and a mirrored word layered across the front of the sculpture. On a nearby screen, images of the sixteen scenes and their words are rapidly intercut, creating new sentences and shifting meaning: "The children feel special today" or "You can smell the flowers".

In the downstairs gallery, the McCoys present Scary Things whose images come from simple elements of nature that can be frightening to children. This sculpture uses a similar technique of tiny cameras, sculptural miniatures, and acrylic text, but here the terrain is one integrated platform. Although the sculpture contains only ten words, hundreds of sentences are created, forming a reduced poetry of fear: "Dogs are fighting scary things" or "Lost birds are scary ".

In 2002, the McCoys showed a series of works in which video clips from television shows were archived into categories and presented in suitcases. These works, like Every Shot Every Episode which created a database of material from Starsky and Hutch, dissected the genres of popular culture. In more recent work such as the Traffic series or Dream Sequence, miniature scenes and small cameras use genre as a reduced narrative language. The projects for this show at Fringe Exhibitions represents a new step in which the database contains both narrative and linguistic elements, examining the shifting equilibrium between images and their names.