Kuras & MacKenzie: 2001 Annual Meeting

March 17 -April 27, 2019

Opening Reception, Sunday March 17, 3-6pm

Click to download the digital version of the printed exhibition poster, including an interview with Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie by gallery director Claudine Isé: 2001 Annual Meeting.

Goldfinch is excited and proud to announce 2001 Annual Meeting, a solo exhibition by Kuras & MacKenzie. The exhibition’s opening reception will take place on Sunday, March 17 from 3-6pm, and the show runs through Saturday, April 27, 2019.

Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie have been collaborating on art projects since 2004. With humor, irony, and disarming sincerity, the works in Kuras & MacKenzie’s 2001 Annual Meeting collectively address ideas of landscape and nostalgia for spaces that signify home, our given place in the world, and related notions of citizenship. The duo’s diverse output have taken the form of prints, drawings, sculptures, and mixed media objects. In this exhibition, the artists put forth questions relating to “the solidity of certain ideas about our relationship to the social contract, our relationship to government, and our relationship to the things we were promised as citizens” in ways that incite further questions rather than propose definitive answers. In a broader sense, 2001 Annual Meeting is also about the push-and-pull of collaboration and commitment, about what it means to collectively participate in acts of creation, production, and authorship, and the attendant tensions, negotiations, discoveries, and mutual camaraderie that result from longtime creative partnerships.

Kuras & MacKenzie Is a collaboration between Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie. Kuras is an Information Architect for the BBC and a painter trained at the University of Calgary, Emily Carr University, the Glasgow School of Art, and Concordia University. MacKenzie is the Chair of Art and Art History at Columbia College Chicago, the managing Founder at Bad at Sports (badatsports.com), and a former partner at the designer toy company Citizen Brick. He was trained at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Sydney, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They live in Manchester and Chicago, respectively, and have been producing artworks together since 2004. Their work has been exhibited across North America and Europe and written about in Art in America, the Chicago Tribune, Art Forum, and Afterall Magazine. Their taste is very different. Kuras reads long, slow, rich novels, while MacKenzie prefers short documents unencumbered by affectual texture and nuanced meandering. They agree that post Misfits, Danzig only produced two note-worthy songs. Just saying.