To Spokane artist Rob McKirdie, entropy is more than just the name of the Spokane gallery where he'll be exhibiting his work through April 27. Meaning both disorder and the tendency toward uniformity, the word entropy serendipitously figures into the title of two of McKirdie's seminal works, one of which is included in the exhibit he titled "Transcendent Departures."
Before he settled on that name, however, McKirdie — thinking back to earlier works he'd made dealing with entropy — toyed with the idea of including the word in the title of his April exhibit.
"When I was tossing around ideas for names for the show [the word entropy] sort of played a little bit, but it didn't gain traction because it wasn't quite where I was at," says McKirdie, a Spokane Falls Community College art instructor since 2015.
McKirdie's art journey has been shaped by many factors, including his upbringing and the schools he attended. As an undergraduate at Portland State University, for example, he was fascinated with the idea of rust — decaying metal — but also kinetic sculptures.
"I have a sort of connection with the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely," McKirdie says, describing his shared heritage with the Swiss sculptor who died in 1991.
Growing up in Salt Lake City, McKirdie split time between his Swiss grandparents' house, where order reigned supreme, and the home he shared with his mother, who was doing the job of both parents.
"I had these two sort of aspects," says McKirdie, who felt an affinity for how the artist Tangley would "challenge that orderly quality and make things that were just a little bit off."
In his work, McKirdie likes to do the same, finding synergy in the unexpected, with a process that "typically starts with a singular idea of seeing whether you can combine things together and [discover] what the result will be," he says.
As a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design, McKirdie moved away from making kinetic sculptures, only half-joking about how graduate school tends to nudge (or, more realistically, shove) artists away from their present ways of working toward a completely new format.
Feeling a little beat up at the time, McKirdie says he "sort of gravitated more to like collecting of materials, and on the East Coast there's just a litany of that stuff."
While in graduate school, McKirdie made frequent forays into New York City, finding abundant materials that resonated with him, like the street sweeper bristles that, ironically, littered the city's streets. When he saw stuff falling off 18-wheelers laden with recyclable metal bound for overseas, McKirdie swooped in behind them armed with a magnet.
"I picked up buckets and buckets and buckets and buckets of these small little pieces of metal that had fallen off these semis, drug those back to my studio and sort of just played" with them, he says.
The result was the 2013 sculpture he'd call "Entropy," which is not included in his upcoming exhibition. Instead, McKirdie created almost all new wall-mounted (versus freestanding or hanging) works for the gallery's enigmatic rounded interior.
McKirdie is, however, also including a piece dealing with the idea of entropy titled "Entropic Cosmology" that debuted in 2021 in SFCC's faculty exhibit at the Gonzaga University Urban Arts Co-op. It features found wooden objects and a mostly flat, shiny metal shape resembling a lake on a topographical map.
The metal shape is the byproduct of an iron pour, an event held by metallurgically minded community members as nearby as Missoula, McKirdie explains.
"We do some work where we are either production pouring — where we make molds of things — or we do performance pours where we just throw metal around to make sparks," McKirdie says, adding that making fireworks from the reaction between molten metal and heat is part of a Chinese light festival called Dashuhua.
For McKirdie, however, the allure of iron-pour events is the metal that has fallen to the ground and cooled.
"It picks up rocks, it picks up random stuff," he says.
These serendipitous metal forms were nickel plated and incorporated into seminal works like "Entropic Cosmology."
Another body of work involves more figurative pieces, which are new for the artist.
"I feel like I've just used objects as stand-ins for the person or for myself," he says, connecting his personal meditative practice with causing a shift in his artwork.
"Flag Had Flung," for example, is a tribute piece to a close friend from graduate school who died from a traumatic heart condition. It features a bronze version of a blocky carved wooden figure with small red construction flags emanating from where the heart would be.
"It's kind of serendipity in that he created that piece in wood and I recreated it in bronze to kind of commemorate him," McKirdie says.
The bronze figure is positioned atop a wall-mounted portion of a rustic table, which also holds a little mechanism that waves a small white flag. Does that mean his friend surrendered? Or that McKirdie has? Or something else?
Maybe all three things are or can be true for the viewer, which McKirdie definitely has in mind as he's working with specific materials.
"I also like the play of people going, 'Oh, I can recognize this, but not in this context,'" he says, mimicking pointing to a sculpture. "I recontextualize" things, he adds, "so I'm trying to create a familiarity, but also sort of a question of like, 'Why is it like this? What's the combination?'"♦
Transcendent Departures • Reception Fri, April 5 from 5-9 pm; open daily from 11 am-6 pm through April 27 • Entropy • 101 N. Stevens St. • facebook.com/entropyspokane • 509-414-3226
