HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

Halsey McKay is pleased to present its second solo exhibition with Oakland, CA based artist Chris Duncan. For The Sun & The Air, Duncan continues his ongoing exploration of the sun as metaphor, inspiration and subject. While previous bodies of work engineered materials to depict, reflect or refract light in real time, here, the works absorb the phenomenon over prolonged periods and employ the celestial body as fabricator. Begun at Stanford University, the project has been an outlet for Duncan to map places, through sun bleaching, that are part of his life and practice: the skylight of his studio, windows of his home, a building where he earned his masters degree, a sculpture that he built in a National Park. Color fabric is placed in these locales and without the use of dye, emulsion or any purposefully manipulated chemical process, imagery emerges through time and ultraviolet exposure.

These seminal pieces were made during a 6 month residency that the artist was granted at Facebook headquarters in Paolo Alto, California. Upon his arrival, Duncan placed sheets of color fabric over metal I-beams, which he found on the roof of the building. Over the course of the residency Duncan executed several on site and community based projects and upon completion he returned to the roof and removed the fabric. The resulting pieces on view mark both the artist’s physical duration of residence as well as the outcomes of environment and atmosphere from this specific site. The lack of authored intervention generously grants personal interpretations that are haunting, elegant and hint of narrative.

Chris Duncan holds a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and his MFA from Stanford University. Recent exhibitions have been with The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Museum Of Modern Art, NY, New York; De Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; Robert Blumenthal Gallery, New York, NY among others. Duncan’s work is held in the collections of the Museum Of Modern Art, New York, NY; The SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; The Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA and the Arsenal, Montreal, Canada. Outside of his studio practice he organizes events and runs a small artist book press and record label called LAND AND SEA with his wife. Duncan currently lives and works in Oakland, California and is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.