Category: Social Practice Talks
PSST: Mack McFarland
Text by Portland State Social Practice Talks
Our new season of Portland State Social Practice Talks focuses on activism. Over the next six weeks we will explore activism in its many forms, and how it relates to art and social practice.
To inaugurate our new term, we are joined by Mack McFarland, an artist and curator at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
You can find the full conversation here.
Mack McFarland is an artist and has worked as Curator for Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2006. Currently McFarland is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA. His past exploits have included commissioned projects of new works from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism. He has also curated survey exhibitions such as a review of Luc Tuymans’s printed works, a group exhibit marking the centennial of John Cage’s birth, and a comprehensive look at the process of the comic journalist Joe Sacco. McFarland’s current focus swirls around issues of class, representation, information environments, and phenomenological perception. These ideas manifest in the forms of exhibitions, postcards, performances, and videos. With his artworks and exhibitions McFarland aims to develop a space for the viewer to experience an intersection of visceral aesthetic and cognition via contemplative sensory experiments.
