Lot 117: CATHY MCCLURE

Set of four ‘Bots’: ‘Bassett’, ‘Lady Bug’, ‘Rooster’, ‘Some Pig’
Undersides of each incised with artist’s signature and ‘1064/2009’ (4).

‘Bassett’: 5 x 15 x 5 1/4 in (12.7 x 38.1 x 13.3 cm); ‘Lady Bug’: 6 x 9 x 6 1/4 in (15.2 x 22.9 x 15.9 cm); ‘Rooster’: 8 1/4 x 7 1/4 x 6 in (21 x 18.4 x 15.2 cm); ‘Some Pig’: 5 1/4 x 8 1/2 x 3 1/2 in (13.3 x 21.6 x 8.9 cm)

Patinated bronze, bronze, metal, plastic, battery-operated mechanism with sound.

2009

‘Remains’, Moss, New York, November 20-December 31, 2009

Arlene Hirst, ‘Moss 2.0’, Modern Magazine, Summer 2012, p. 78 for similar examples

Acquired directly from the artist

Her hands wielding scissors, McClure massacres motor-driven robotic plush toys, eviscerating them through a Geppetto-like taxidermy until she gets down, as she says, ‘into the guts of the piece’. Skinning the bots to the bone, all that remains are their various articulated plastic limbs and bodily armature. Then, recasting the limbs and armatures in the most archetypical fine art medium, bronze, McClure’s Frankensteinian re-assembly of the new parts involves craft-like re-fittings and manipulations as well as re-installation of the original circuit-boards, batteries, gears, and voice-boxes.

Like Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov’s watercolors, which appear on the next page, McClure’s ‘Bots’ expose the skeletal nature of their subjects; both artists skin their characters in order to depict their core, discovering and exposing their true essence.