In multimedia works throughout the main galleries, McCutcheon examines intersections between acts of play and acts of self-transformation. While naturalistic in style, the sculpture Phoom! Crack! Kapow! Eeehaa! (2009) connotes the language and tradition of comic books and Pop art of the 1960s. The words in the title also suggest an explosive catalytic encounter, which in this case takes place not between two villains or superheroes, but between the likenesses of a father and a son. The uncanny sculpture represents Angus at four years old, wearing his father’s work clothes. While the rendering initially appears to be straightforward—a little boy in a man’s clothes—closer observation reveals slight alterations. For example, the life lines molded into the palms of the sculpture’s small hands are Brian’s rather than Angus’s. This subtle change becomes a way of acknowledging the artist’s own hand in the preliminary drawings he made with his son. This work compresses space and time, conflating childhood and adulthood into a moment wherein one is simultaneously a boy and a man.

Brian McCutcheon
Phoom! Crack! Kapow! Eehaa!, 2009
Courtesy of the Artist, with support from Sculpture Space and The Efroymson Family Fund, a CICF Fund