What I get from Killoran’s conceptually-oriented practice.

I keep thinking about Patrick Killoran’s intriguing artist’s talk yesterday, delivered at the beautiful Central Branch of the Queens Library in Jamaica. It was part of Opening Day of the library installations in the Queens Museum’s Queens International.

Killoran’s projects are often conceptual and phenomenological. His projects offer aesthetic situations in unorthodox media and environments. His practice relates to other practices at the merging of art and life. He spoke about how dependence on the white cube to frame something as art is almost a political liability of exceptionalism. 

Killoran is interested in making art as simply and elegantly as possible, trimming away anything that’s unnecessary. He doesn’t locate ‘the work’ in the objects he makes solely—he locates it in viewers’ interactions with each other as mediated by the object, with their bodies in the space.

Patrick Killoran demonstrating “Insight,” his project that turns a t-shirt into a camera obscura. This is the first project he made when he moved to NYC 20 years ago. I think it’s so smart to introduce his work with this. It helps audiences come along on a journey of his thought process.

Rebound is Killoran’s dispersed library project. He re-covers books he’s reading with the instructions that commit the book to become a common resource, meant to stay in circulation at the responsibility of each reader. Here is the front cover, which explains how people participate.

The back cover of the Rebound books have a sign-in form. While it resembles a inter-office envelope, I liked thinking about it as a counterpoint to the sign-in book you’d find at a trail summit. The latter marks a place and an achievement. This sheet, in contrast, documents whose hands the book has passed through, marking movement via sharing.

Killoran’s Passage, an intervention in the stacks at the Central Queens Library. The inside of the box is laminated with a photo of the actual stacks that the box is located in. It’s actually a little hard to find the artwork in the library—I walked right past it. Discovering it is part of the pleasure.

When you squat down and look through Passage, this is what you see. At first, when I saw a similar photo on a flyer, I thought it was an illusion created with mirrors. When I looked through the actual artwork, I had an “Inception” moment: what seemed like 2-D or shallow 3-D is actually deep 3-D. In other words, the project isn’t about the illusion of depth, it is actual spatial depth. It extends the length of the entire library—over 100 feet. 

There’s a lot of wonderful openness in Passage, from seeing other people look through the box, to when patrons re-shelve books in the space, to seeing other patrons observe still other patrons interacting. I think this is an incredibly successful project. I think it achieves what Killoran’s after, with a maximal implications using minimal means.

This type of work may appear very simple. The solution is so ingenious as to seem inevitable. But making this type of art is intellectually laborious, time-consuming, and rigorous. I really respect this practice, and am grateful for the chance to hear it explained thoughtfully.

Visit PatrickKilloran.com to learn more about his work. (It’s a nicely organized, selective site with just enough text to describe each project.) I think his overarching practice is about interrogating public life: the unspoken rules, behaviors, and manifestations of courtesy, kindness, greed, compliance and non-compliance. He is interested in social relations in a neutral way. His works are experiments that say more about us than about him. 

The artist’s talk reminded me of when I was making elemental, conceptual, phenomenological installations. I remember struggling to convey the nature of my interests in single images. Two-dimensional images just don’t capture experiential phenomena. I remember wondering how many people viewed my slides and didn’t “get” my practice. Sometimes your art is best shared as stories, jokes, surprises, or upendings of expectations, and the artist’s talk is a better form than slides.

In preparation for this project, Killoran held many conversations with library staff members. It made me want to have more space for conversations in my own research. Conversations can evolve and be more natural and spontaneous than writing. I’ll need to get out of my shell more. 

Learn more about all the installations at the Queens Library (which includes The People’s Guide to the Queens International, a collaboration between Brian Droitcour and me).

You are invited to write about your response to Killoran’s installation. Find The People’s Guide to the Queens International writing station, located at the end of the stacks where the installation begins. Or, just look for the stacks hold books on “Unexplained Phenomena.” Complete a form and enter it into the submission box below. We’ll print submissions in our zine and on ThePeoplesGuideQI.org.