Michael Jones McKean

McKean's work engages an interest in deep time, timescales and their collapse, in the process decentering historically anthropocentric registrations of events, distances and meaning.

Through his working process he questions stable definitions such as real and replica, natural and synthetic, fact and fiction, past and future by employing diverse media such as ancient meteorites, primitive textiles, obsolete technologies, raw clay, psychotropic medicines, and prismatic rainbows.

McKean's family moved to the United States in the late 1970s settling in Arden, Delaware, a village founded in 1900 as a radical Georgist single-tax community.

This was an important realization for me, that within sculpture's genetic makeup I couldn't create the meanings contained in our most culturally popular forms: think the novel, the essay, film, TV shows, YouTube videos, theater, music.

As part of his large scale installation Riverboat Lovesongs for the Ghost Whale Regatta, presented at Grand Arts in Kansas City, McKean researched in the linkage circumnavigation and failure.

The route takes into consideration the literally millions of minute shifts in elevation encountered while actually traveling to ultimately arrive at the longest path around the Earth.

McKean commissioned the University of Kansas Department of Geography and Cartography to help engineer an algorithm using their computer array to sift and arrange billions of geographic data points.

Writing about Mckean's work, Stacy Switzer states: "The Great Circuit is a conceptual artwork and a counterintuitive test of limits based on a hypothetical journey that may or may not be physically possible.

As the catalyst for an extraordinary body of information—one born of hard science but which hovers unfixed to the realm of common utility—McKean performs a kind of radical, interdisciplinary sleight-of-hand.

Speaking with Clayton Sean Horton in 2013 in advance of his solo show at Horton Gallery in New York City, McKean states: "The sculptures embrace a double-reality where materials and objects travel between their lives 'with us;' a reality that supports their associative meanings, poetics, functions, references, mythologies, politics, and ordering systems that we construct for them, and their inward, private lives as pure material 'without us;' a parallel, more speculative reality where objects float in psychic voids, ambivalent to our desires and needs for them….

With the assistance of an interdisciplinary team of scientists, geographers, designers, technologists and more, the project will connect twelve invocatory sites around the earth along a perfect ring - a great circle.

McKean is the owner of the Teignmouth Electron, an infamous 40 foot trimaran yacht helmed by the late Donald Crowhurst, who failed in his attempt to become the first person to circumnavigate the earth solo, without stopping.

After years of researching the boat and its history, in 2007 McKean purchased the vessel, currently beached on Cayman Brac, as a means of fundamentally altering the relationship with the object.