Territories | March 19 - April 18th, 2015
There is so much force condensed inside Charles McGill's large scale Tondos, on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, that you can't help but be mesmerized by these frieze-like sculptures. The tondos (from the Italian rotondo - round), totems and smaller free-standing sculptures are created by re-assembling golf bags that have been torn, cut apart, pulled in all directions, collaged and made to comply with the artist's will.

Charles McGill, Skull, 2014

And there are so many layers of contradictions contained within these sculptures. There are surfaces that appear to be soft and pliable, but are neither and as soon as you make that discovery, you see stiff plastic tubing crushed into submission, zippers glaring in cold indifference, screws, nails, brads and other metals piercing the leather in the most violent ways. Expectations of calm dictated by the circular, halo-like shape of McGill's tondos instead reveal hurricanes brewing inside each one. So much so, that these sculptures are still vibrating with the artist's determination of making the materials conform to his will.

'Target 51', 'Territories', 'Little Indian', 'White (Tondo)', 'Scull', 'Goat, Bull, Rooster, Horse', (don't you just love the titles?) along with every other work in this exhibition, were born without studies, without plans, without the slightest notion of their final states. For Charles McGill the process is fundamentally intuitive. There is a need to create and because of this need he allows the materials to guide him, but theirs is not a passive relationship. A "tug-of-war" is how he described it when we sat down to discuss the exhibition and his creative process.

Video interview transcript:

Charles McGill: I don’t think there is real symbolism for me with the circle, however, there is a compositional challenge within a circle that I’ve always kind of been interested in.

Michelangelo Buonarotti, Taddei Tondo, 1505

The first one I did was the white tondo and I didn’t really know what to think about it, and I sent it to a friend of mine in California, Joe Lewis, who is an artist also and he sent me back a Michelangelo tondo, which was strikingly similar to the one I had just made. And it really blew my mind and gave me an affirmation that this was probably a good direction to go in.

I’ve been working with the golf bag material for several years. It’s a material that seems to not want to cooperate with my intentions for it. So in that process there is a lot of tug-of-war. A lot of wrestling, a lot of stress and emotions spent. In that process comes something that I don’t expect as a result. But when I am finished, I am, most of the times, happy with the results I have achieved.

Taking a vessel, if you will, and an object that is meant for leisure and the kind of emotion I spend with that material is the exact opposite of the emotion you would carry out on to the golf course.

The fact that these golf bags are manufactured to be durable, to have longevity, to stay together and not come apart, those elements of that material are the thing that kind of a catalyst for me. If they came apart easier, I don’t know that I would get the same work.
The inspiration
Charles McGill, Little Indian, 2014 Reconfigured golf bags

Certainly, Philip Guston. I wouldn’t say he is a direct influence, but it’s certainly hard not to make that connection if you have a hooded figure, so I do look at him from time to time. And of course Michelangelo and Nancy Grossman. I can’t say enough about her work. I’ve never been that familiar with her work in terms of a studied relationship with it, until very recently. I’m almost kind of ashamed to say that, but as I look at her work, the kinship with the way she worked with leather and or vinyl, and the way she incorporated zippers,