Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Special Things" as installed in a solo exhibition at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles, September 2006.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Special Things," 2006
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Special Things," 2006
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Special Things," 2006
In 2006 Jennifer and Kevin McCoy featured two contrasting installations Special Things and Scary Things at their first Los Angeles show at the gallery Fringe Exhibitions. The installations both focus on the cultural theories they both studied in France, structuralism and its descendant, deconstruction. “The theories insist, that is, that culture, including silly children’s books, conditions everything we think we know about our world, such as what counts as “special” and “scary,”…”[5]
The Special Things installation consists of sixteen small dioramas hanging from the ceiling of the gallery attached to sixteen tiny security cameras that transmit live video of the models to a screen. Each diorama consists of plastic scenery with a word in acrylic letters in the foreground. On the screen the scenes and their words are rapidly intercut, creating new sentences and shifting meaning. The phrases that come out talk about what counts as “special” to a kid. For example phrases created include, “The children feel special today” and “You can smell the flowers”.
[5] Blake Gopnik, “Artists Who Dissect ‘Starsky & Hutch’; Couple Pieces Together Metaphors for Disjointed Times,” Washington Post, October 8, 2006, sec. Sunday Arts; N04
