My current work is public, collaborative and relational. The basic theme is people: people working, people living; our personal and general struggles, our creative energies and our wasted potential, our anxieties that freeze us in place and our power to overcome. I incorporate elements of performance, literature, music, interactive and functional sculpture, prints and film. My work is about sharing, both of the process and the result, the trial and the reward. It is about taking a holistic approach to living and making that doesn’t especially distinguish between the two. If our work is how we define ourselves, then my work is life, and it’s my life’s work. Art is a divisive term, but the idea of work unifies what both artists and non-artists do with their time. It is the basic activity. This is my starting point: my work is about work.
I am interested in working locally and establishing long-term commitments to my sites. I want to do projects that take on a life of their own through the people they touch, that continue to grow and evolve even after I’m not able to pay as much attention to them anymore. Since my work involves public participation, it is important to form friendships and work from that basis, with an understanding of the strengths and interests of all involved. I am interested in spontaneity, teamwork, play, intuition, efficiency, chance, adventure, difference, language, volunteerism, problem solving, recovery, sustainability, comfort, learning, discovery, attainment: all of it, all at once.
During my residency at the CUE Art Foundation, I intend to make the streets of Chelsea a forum for the encouragement of dialogue and understanding among the various users of the neighborhood: artists, gallerists, collectors, taxi and delivery drivers, maintenance workers, local residents, etc. This will be accomplished by establishing a daily-recurring visible presence in the area: playing impromptu sidewalk games with passersby, building functional constructions and forts out of found bulky waste, wheatpasting collages on temporary construction walls from found clippings and trash, operating a miniature library of handmade books, projecting films in key locations by night, having street picnics and community soup potlucks, and so on. This is part of an ongoing concern with the role of the artist as a worker in the larger society, favoring an integrated and ethical scenario to the more prevalent reclusive individualism. Moreover it is part of a long-standing theme regarding the potential energy alive in humanity, and an optimistic effort to maximize that energy in all avenues of life.
Emcee C.M., Master of None, f.k.a. Colin McMullan
Emcee C.M., Master of None was born in Coventry, Connecticut, in 1979. He grew up in a family of six boys, studied Linguistics, Russian and Studio Arts at Brandeis University and then worked at a small Siberian village trade college. He completed an MFA at the University of Connecticut in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Emcee C.M., Master of None, is an everyman nobody, a loving caricature of the world’s preoccupation with the questions of work and leisure. He has exhibited at the Benton Museum and the Lot at Artspace, both in Connecticut, Galleria Illy, Conflux and Sideshow in New York, Hau Eins in Berlin, NMAC in Spain, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, and the Night of Museums in Belgrade, Serbia. He has also presented numerous unofficial and collaborative projects in public spaces and has shows coming up at the Bronx Museum and Artists Space in New York.