Dave McKenzie
b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica
Lives in New York
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Wednesday–Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM
Tuesday, closed
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the program
After taking part in Prospect.1 in 2008, Dave McKenzie has been invited back to New Orleans along with four other returning artists to create work for this edition of the triennial. For his original project, McKenzie made a commitment to revisit the city annually for ten years in a piece aptly titled I’ll Be Back. The work operated as a kind of verbal contract, one to be taken on faith with this place, as the artist created no documentation of his visits and, like many of his works, it has become a piece of quotidian mythology. The decade-long project encompassing McKenzie’s yearly sojourns to New Orleans overlapped with the passing of his father, Wilfred, in 2010. His current project elaborates on mortality and mourning in the form of a funerary memorial devoted to Wilfred. Titled 831-195-G Hope—the location of his father’s niche at Hope Mausoleum in New Orleans—the work reveals how this city unexpectedly serves as a site of interment for McKenzie’s grief around his father’s death.
His ode appears in two sites: the museum gallery and Hope Mausoleum. Three documentary photographs in handmade frames are included here, serving as an index for this project. They depict a bracelet that once belonged to his father, the handmade box the artist placed the bracelet in, and the site where this object was interred. Ultimately, McKenzie has created a burial location that features a memento of his father that, without his father’s remains, functions as a cenotaph, an empty tomb or monument to someone buried elsewhere. While the bodily absence of Wilfred and his biographical disconnection from New Orleans underscore the arbitrariness of the entombment, and perhaps of our rituals around death more generally, the project’s role in blurring the line between McKenzie’s artistic and familial commitments offers a poetic and open logic around memory, grief, and place. As a cenotaph, 831-195-G Hope unfolds new possibilities of recollection across public-private and personal-professional divides.
about the artist
In his videos, sculptures, performances, and installations, Dave McKenzie explores how public space and the private self are simultaneously alienated, connected, and restricted. At the heart of McKenzie’s diverse practice lies a poetic quest for interaction that lays bare the complications of social rules and obligations with which we navigate personal relationships. Dave McKenzie received a BFA in printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (2000) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. McKenzie’s recent solo exhibitions include Speeches, Speeches, Speeches, Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin; An Intermission, University Art Museum, State University of New York, Albany; Where the Good Lord Split You, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Dave McKenzie, Aspen Art Museum; Screen Doors on Submarines, REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Momentum 8: Dave McKenzie, ICA Boston. McKenzie’s work has been included in several biennials and notable group exhibitions including: Soft Power, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Etched in Collective History, at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; and Prospect.1, New Orleans.
Dave McKenzie, 831-195-G Hope, 2021. Photographs in artist-made frames, 19 ½ x 14 ½ x 1 ½ inches. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks