Lucas McMahon – (everything must go) on Exhibition

Friday, December 1, 2023 – Friday, January 19, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, December 1, 2023, 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 P.M. MT

Rotunda Gallery

The Galleries at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design are proud to present an exhibition titled (everything must go) on that features a new body of work by multimedia artist Lucas McMahon. The opening reception will be Friday, December 1, from 4:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M. in the Rotunda Gallery, coinciding with the opening of the Fall 2023 Graduation Exhibition in the Philip J. Steele Gallery next door.

McMahon is a visual artist living and working in Denver, Colorado, featured in New American Paintings, # 114. In 2014, he received his BFA in Painting from Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, and currently works as the 3D Studios Assistant at the college.

In his first solo-exhibition, McMahon presents new artworks of densely layered and intricate paintings and collages, as well as video and audio creations. By creating stunning abstractions through digital and analog manipulations, McMahon presents profound questions and thoughts on a myriad of existential concerns. Below is the statement from the artist:

“Art, as life, is a sprawling and vibrant ecosystem of often irreconcilable truths. Though they can seem at times contrasting, contradictory, or contrary in nature; these truths are not necessarily diametrically opposed like some orbiting inverted binaries. They simply exist. The trajectories of these ideas are sometimes parallel, they may slightly skew, intersect and overlap, or oppose. But they mingle, constantly and fluidly; a clamor of conversation in a large room.

These works are non-didactic. Their equations remain unsolved. Some are solved, but have no proof. Intentionally vague and paradoxical, everything must go (on) lulls the viewer into a stimulation overload, an anxiety induced trance-like meditation. The themes include the mechanisms of late stage hyper-capitalism, intricacies of global politics, armed conflict, and monopolized state violence.

The work also ruminates on the incalculable effects environmental catastrophe poses for future (human and non-human) generations. Simultaneously, it acts as a celebration of the many wonders of being alive, such as the improbable beauty of the evolution of intelligent life in the universe, the unpinnable interface between biologically formed consciousness and its experience of an outside world, and the underlying forces of our cosmos bring everything into being through sheer computation. Existence is a really strange and beautiful place.”