Dan McCann’s mixed-media boxes come from mind and heart
The creations are curious, thoughtful, and from the mind of artist Dan McCann.
“I try to stay consistent, offering spaces from my mind,” he said.
And his creations are just that; spaces of imagination, neatly confined in boxes.
A box constructor, mixed-media artist and sculptor, McCann interprets the world around him in his own language, using pieces of things like an alphabet. His studio or “man cave,” as he calls it, is the entire basement in his South Hill home and it is filled with music (“How can the world exist without Miles Davis?” he asked), books and hundreds of toy figurines: eye candy for the child in all of us.
McCann, 56, finds inspiration everywhere and is influenced by other artists as well as objects around him. His tools of the trade include, well, anything you can imagine, from Altoid tins to sticks, cardboard shoe inserts to dice.
“I see all this stuff in everything and wonder what I can turn it into,” he said, “I don’t see like a painter but an engineer.”
The wooden boxes he constructs are, in layman’s terms, shadow boxes, which are often used to immortalize objects. The items are placed in the box and a transparent “lid” enables the objects to be gazed upon for years to come. They are three-dimensional; they cast shadows and evoke emotion.
McCann has been creating art for 20 years. Self-taught, he said he learns by doing and letting his youthful imagination run wild. In 1988, McCann visited an exhibit in Washington, D.C., of Joseph Cornell’s (1903-1972) work. “The show took my heart. I loved the confinement of space and the themes,” McCann said. Cornell has been noted as being “fascinated by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects” which he then assembled into boxes.
In a sense, McCann’s boxes are time capsules, logical yet irrational assemblages of things that do not belong together yet seem to fit. His first box, created in 1989, tells the story of a stick turned futuristic, Borglike with metal attachments. Is it watching that box within a box and that round object for signs of life? It is hard not to look at his work and be transported into childhood where anything was possible.
McCann has shown his work in dozens of exhibits including the Tacoma Art Museum, the Spokane Art School Gallery, Chase Gallery in City Hall, and the Koehler Gallery at Whitworth University. A recent show at the Shop on Perry Street was a display of his carved chalkboards that looked like an ancient language on sections of outdated green chalkboards. He also builds dolls out of old gloves and found objects, and three-dimensional wall hangings.
Currently he is showing in a self-portrait invitational at the Spokane Falls Community College Fine Art Gallery through Feb. 2. Called “Locals,” the show will include the works of 17 area visionary artists portraying parts of themselves in a multitude of mediums. Over a dozen boxes complete McCann’s life-sized piece titled “Oh Danny Boy.”
“I love doing it,” McCann said, “It feels good.”