THE FALL — Wit McKay

The Fall, 2020- 22

Entropy and vertigo

Wit McKay’s most recent, ongoing project is The Fall. It is a reaction to the turmoil that started with the COVID pandemic. In early March of 2020, he was starting a Visiting Artist residency at The American Academy in Rome. While there he witnessed Rome shut down precipitously and made an emergency evacuation, through JFK where he contracted COVID, a mild but frightening case.

What became The Fall began the next week with March 20, 2020, Dusk. The project revolves around the roiling disasters that began with the pandemic: George Floyd’s murder, wildfires, political chaos, election subversion, fungible truth, the insurrection, seemingly repeating ad nauseum.

The themes of The Fall- entropy and vertigo- coalesced in the piece 2020 Fall. The feeling of imminent disaster, collapse into chaos, was contrasted with an incredibly beautiful Fall season in the Berkshires. Physical balance was literally hard to maintain. Instability and decay emerged as central to the series in this image.

These large scale, 72"- 104", highly saturated prints of digital collage images are fabricated in the computer from several contiguous frames gathered in the field. Borders between the frames may be obvious, or hidden, or both, along one transition. This multi-frame panorama technique provides several advantages. First: proximity- getting closer and seeing more while showing the breadth of a scene otherwise unachievable. Second: size- it produces very large files and prints, up to 106” with crisp detail. Last: perspective- the compositions are distorted in significant, at times disorienting ways that would be optically impossible in a single frame. They incorporate both repetitions and voids, which both engage and confound the viewer: adding complexity and emphasizing a synthetic view through time, as opposed to a unique photographic instant.