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

Jennifer McMackon, Rorschach Test Wall, 1992
Jennifer McMackon, Rorschach Test Wall, arrangement of paintings and objects on a wall, detail, 1992
inks, paper oil paint on board, flocked kleenex box covers with chrome

This is an installation view of Personality Test Wall. The work continued a pedagogical interest in psychological tests, this time the ubiquitous Rorschach. Rather than offer the viewer the space to interpret the inkblots on their own, I juxtaposed a grid of flocked velvet and chrome kleenex boxes, trailed by paintings of single inanimate objects. I used the industrial infrastructure of the studio to create an axis or fold on the other side of which the arrangement was repeated symmetrically but not identically.

From my artist statement at the time: “My works 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”