Jennifer + Kevin McCoy

Index is an EMPAC-commissioned public art installation by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, which consists of multiple sculptures filmed via small, live cameras. The resulting video projection, as well as the models, will appear throughout EMPAC’s public spaces during an extended residency with the artists. The first works will be exhibited on April 2.

Inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story called “The Index,” in which an alphabetized list of people and places are turned into an implied, overarching narrative, the McCoys’ list spans the 1960s to today, referencing globalization, technology, mass migrations, and war. Corporate campuses, film sets, Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, and factories all collide in a globalized mediated framework that exists to support utopian goals, even as it rests upon resource depletion, financial instabilities, and entropic decay. These problems of environmental and economic collapse persist in the face of the never-changing rhetoric of the assumed benefits of the technological future.