About Kevin Mack Art

Las Vegas City Life - A Conversation About Kevin Mack's "New Forms" Exhibit at Brett Wesley Gallery

"SCOTT: I don’t mean to sound too critical, but this is pretty cool.

JENESSA: Yeah, it’s definitely got a lot to offer. It’s got this really strong Dali-eque vibe. The title of the piece kind of gives it away. Neurosymphonic. You might see that there’s kind of a musical instrument up here in the front that’s been warped.
Dali comes to mind because I see this clock here --

SCOTT: It’s melting.

JENESSA: Right. So we have this classic nod that seems to be happening here.

SCOTT: When people talk about abstract art, they usually mean art in which the images don’t look like actual things. But here you can see elements of actual things…

JENESSA: Whenever you’re looking at something, like say you’re looking at clouds, your mind always wants to find something recognizable in the abstract. [There’s a word for that tendency: pareidolia.] So Kevin is leaving little pieces of recognizable things that you can latch onto to satisfy that left-brain impulse: “Oh, I know what that is, that’s part of a trumpet; that’s part of a motorcycle headlight,” and then you can move on and get lost in the imagery, travel through the layers, starting with that little piece you were able to latch onto."

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The Avant Garde Diaries "Between Order And Chaos"

"Mark Frauenfelder first discovered Kevin Mack through his special effects work on the film Fight Club; however, it was Mack's strictly artistic work that really piqued Frauenfelder's interest. Mack's art takes the vast and still uncharted area of digital technology and brings it into the physical world. The results are images printed on canvas which vacillate between abstraction and photorealism, and virtual sculptures transformed into the tangible via three-dimensional printing technology."

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Hollywood Today Review of Mack And Mack Exhibit

"While gazing across at Kevin’s prints, which use the latest digital processes to render into physical tangibility what once had been confined to a computer screen, I felt like I was witness to a game-changing instant in the evolution of art, when the artist’s freedom-loving imagination and the challenging world of digital process had united in perfect harmony."

- Bruce Lyons

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"I'm the Son of Tinkerbell" Kevin Mack Gweek Podcast with Mark Frauenfelder

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

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Hollywood Today article on Kevin Mack

"Kevin may look like a physicist, but just below the tempered surface we quickly discover a man burning with the creative urge to transform art, people and the world. His fire is not frenetic but it is intense. He once said that he yearned to produce works of art that psycho actively transport people to a new realm – direct metamorphosis if you like – a place where the self can burn with illumination."

- Bruce Lyons

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Lines and Colors art blog review

"Kevin Mack’s digital compositions are like a roller coaster for your eyes. You glide into them on big swooping forms that recede into the depths, looping and swirling among themselves like the veinous system of an android, or vibrating into a crenulated landscape of primary colors. As you go further into the images (and “into” is the operative word), traceries of liquid strands twist around floating islands of Henry Moore forms, and sinuous wires multi-colored quicksilver explode into blossoms of robotic flowers."

"If I seem to be waxing poetic, it’s because Mack’s images are conducive to the kind of dreamlike interpretation and “animals in the clouds” visions that are characteristic of the fantastical landscapes of Max Ernst or Robert Venosa; sort of a hyperdimensional Jackson Pollock on digital steroids, or Yves Tanguy in a blender."

"It’s hard for me to look at these and not think of them as digital sculptures, and marvel at how fantastic they would be if they could be made into actual physical objects that you could walk around (or through)."
- Charley Parker
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Kevin Mack and wife Snow Mack featured on Art At Will episode

Isaac Mackie and Flynn Helper of Art At Will made this cool show on us.

Wired magazine profile from 8/99

"When Fincher asked Digital Domain for the brain fly-through for Fight Club, he already knew that Mack had transformed Marina del Rey into Beijing for Red Corner and had created the hypnagogic afterworld in What Dreams May Come. Fincher, and other directors like Luc Besson of The Fifth Element fame, request Mack because the 40-year-old artist and animator, matte painter and model maker, and photographer and compositor is a master at seamlessly weaving various components into live-action worlds. They know that Mack (who earned his first Academy Award this year as part of the f/x team for What Dreams May Come) is a leader among a new coterie of Hollywood wizards: the guys who create "invisible effects" - computer-enhanced scenes that fool the audience into believing the shots were produced with live actors on location, but are really composed of a mélange of digital and live-action footage.

But what Fincher did not know was that Mack had already devoured almost every major book on computational neuroscience and complex adaptive systems, and was aching for a chance to shoehorn his extracurricular obsession into a movie."

- Mark Frauenfelder

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