art and projects > Select Past Work (in reverse chronological order)

Jennifer McMackon, IQ Testwall
Jennifer McMackon, IQ Test Wall, vinyl paintings on dry-wall structure, 1990
wood, dry-wall, acrylic, vinyl

This is an installation shot of some of the earliest work I made as a professional artist. IQ Test Wall was made for a group exhibition I also curated, called Aurathon.

These paintings had no surface. The paint was applied to the underside of heavy, shiny transparent vinyl that was then stretched over wooden armatures.

The representational images were culled from old IQ Tests. In each image something is missing that an individual taking the test would have been asked to identify. In this work I played the part of a somewhat precocious test subject, juxtaposing the images with flagrant abstractions rather than comply by adding the obvious missing elements.


From my artist statement at the time: “My work borrows the formal structure of “testing” from the arena of science. I am especially interested in psychological tests, the kinds that objectively try and measure subjective information. They seem most analogous to discourses on art… constrained by social and historical sediments and subject to immanent collapse”