Chlorophyll by Bruce McKaig
“Chlorophyll prints are photographs printed directly on leaves using ultraviolet light from the sun. Exposures take days or weeks and the resulting image is fragile and will eventually fade away or crumble to dust.
I have been working primarily with images that friends send me during quarantine. The process is mostly hurry-up-and-wait, which invites me to resist the anxiety and engage the processes of change. These are brutal times. The Band-Aids have been ripped off and it hurts. The pain guts old definitions of creativity, productivity, complicity, compassion, and solidarity.
Working with these images helps me feel connected despite being in isolation. (Wearing a mask also helps me feel connected.) The work connects me to plants and nature, the light and changing seasons, and my past thanks to the portraits of my chosen family of friends.
I make the images on leaves but each friend makes their own portrait. This is another layer of collaboration and connection. By mid-fall the natural cycles will put new exposures on hold until next year. Over the winter, I will make individual wooden cases for each print and try to be prepared for what next year will bring.
My biggest fear is that everything goes back to the way it was before the pandemic, that we collectively learn how to make bigger better Band-Aids instead of genuine progress.”
Bruce McKaig has been a visual artist for over thirty years, living in North and South America, Europe, Siberia, and India. Initially using photography, his practice also explores sculpture, time-based, performance, and advocacy work on art and socioeconomic issues. He has been awarded numerous private and public grants from the City of Paris, Washington DC, and Baltimore MD. He has participated in over forty-five solo and two hundred group exhibitions since 1980 and has works in museum collections in the USA, France, and Guatemala.
Bruce has taught art in universities, museums, and community centers, working with the general public, senior citizens, autistic teenagers, and incarcerated psychiatric patients. He has over ten years experience in teaching the arts to children ages 5 through 12. He regularly lectures and writes on photography, and has curated group and solo exhibitions of other artists’ work since 1988.
Since 2000, he has devoted time to public art projects and advocating for ethical funding policies in the arts and across all industries. Bruce was a 2016 New Economy Maryland Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, working on funding policies and practices in the arts. He received the 2016 Crusade for Art Engagement Grant to build a barter network between artists and tradespeople in Baltimore. He was awarded a 2018 Mayor’s Individual Artist Grant from the City of Baltimore, for his work on art and labor practices. During his Equal Justice Residency in 2018 at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Bruce used photography, videography, writing, performance and Social Practices to investigate methods of measuring and compensating workers for their presence and contributions to communities at large.
He currently teaches in the Art & Art History Department at Georgetown University and lives at Artists’ Housing Inc. in East Baltimore.