What Is Possible Is Here Now

Above: a brief sample from the videos

As Gordon’s schoolwide art show opened this week, a Gordon family was celebrating an opening of their own at the Providence Children's Museum.

Megan and Murray McMillan have a new video installation, What Is Possible Is Here Now, at the PCM - one they produced in collaboration with their children, Kindergarten and fourth grade students here at Gordon.

The work is focused on ideas close to the heart of Gordon’s mission, and the PCM’s too: childhood play and collaborative creativity, centered around a young person’s view of the world. As the pair describe it:

For this work, we worked collaboratively with our two children on a series of videos incorporating objects like ones we remembered from our own childhood play.These videos are experiments with techniques of unscripted performance and collaborative mutual making. Through observing play while making subtle object-based interventions, we looked for the magic moments when the collective unconscious, collaborative meaning-making and connection happened. 
 

Above: a detail from the installation

There is an opening celebration on Wednesday, March 8th, at 5pm, with free admission and a DJ set from Huey Lincoln of Gordon’s faculty. RSVPs are appreciated, at this link.

This installation was created through the Providence Children's Museum's Creativity Initiative, a groundbreaking three-year project that seeks to connect all children to Rhode Island’s creative community.

The McMillans have been doing this work all over the world for the past twenty years. From their bio:

Megan and Murray McMillan have exhibited their large-scale video installations at Mass MoCA in Massachusetts, the Kunsthallen Brandts Museum in Odense, Denmark, The State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, The RISD Museum in Rhode Island, the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA in Maine, and the deCordova Museum in Massachusetts. Their work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, film festivals, and international biennials. 

As artists who have been collaborating since 2002 on large-scale installations which incorporate video and performance, their process involves constructing architectural sets that become the stage for a series of photographs and video consisting of performers who activate the movable set pieces. The project’s presentation is often a video installation that references the original set and its materials that reframes the video and allows the viewer to enter into the world of the recorded performance. 

Parts of the process behind What Is Possible Is Here Now are on Instagram.

 

Above: a second sample from the videos