MIF 002: Doug McCollough

Christopher Schreck speaks with Los Angeles-based artist Doug McCollough about "Rosebud" (2024), a static-kinetic sculpture whose abstracted form, inbuilt potential for movement, and decided lack of function marked a clear departure in his practice.

Transcript

Christopher Schreck: From Marta, Los Angeles, this is Motion in Field, a series of conversations with contemporary artists about their most experimental, unconventional, and boundary pushing works. I'm Christopher Schreck. 

Today, we're joined by Doug McCullough, a Los Angeles-based practitioner whose work neatly blurs the line between functional design and fine art.

Drawing on motifs from various American decorative arts histories, Doug's approach blends material driven lyricism with a subtle playfulness and exacting technical precision. To date, he's perhaps best known for his distinctive handcrafted furniture, which he's produced under his own name as well as part of his former collaborative project L.A. Door - but in 2024, he entered new territory with the unveiling of “Rosebud,” a static-kinetic sculpture whose abstracted form, inbuilt potential for movement, and decided lack of function marked a clear departure in his output. 

In this episode, Doug speaks to the circumstances that led to this exciting new work and how it signals a broader turn towards experimentation in his practice.

Thanks for listening.

So as an entry point for discussing “Rosebud,” maybe we can start by talking about your experience with L.A. Door, since it sounds like this latest piece is in many ways an extension of ideas you explored with Katie. 

Doug McCollough: Yeah, so L.A. Door is the project I did with Katie Payne, kind of on-again off-again from 2019 to 2023. Katie and I were friends, we were romantic partners, we were collaborators - it kind of ran the gamut - and we connected over furniture. I met her when she was the gallery director at Billings Auctions in Los Angeles - prior to that, she had a degree from Sotheby's in American Fine Art and Decorative Design - and then my background was in furniture design and furniture making. I was interested in a huge range of furniture: Danish, French modernism, American studio craft movement, almost everything except “brown” furniture, which was actually Katie's wheelhouse and what she kind of opened my eyes to. That was a whole world; I realized how fertile it was with motifs and with building techniques and this whole history that I had not appreciated. And it’s very unhip: Katie and I would go there to the “brown” furniture world and it kind of felt like we were all alone, and I think that gave us a lot of freedom to think about that style of furniture – and by that, I mean things like blanket chests, corner cabinets, highboys, federal style, Philadelphia 1700s, Queen Anne. L.A. Door was sort of about identifying these iconic American forms: certain folk pieces that were detached from what was fashionable at the time, but also stuff that was really fashionable. We would go to places like the Yale Furniture Archive, which is packed with this stuff. We’d visit old mansions like the Winterthur Mansion in Delaware. These are places that Katie knew about through her time studying at Sotheby's. So, we were identifying these forms, and then we sort of realized, “Okay, these are all classic American forms that are in the textbooks, but it would be terrible to write a history of American furniture design without including something like the La-Z-Boy, right? It’s arguably one of the most important furniture designs to come out of the United States. So, you're going to fancy museums, looking at these really important antiques that are sort of the height of craft and fashionable design for their time, but then you go into a thrift store and you're like, “Wait, this stuff's kind of iconic too, right? This stuff's also really important to American furniture history.” It sort of levels the playing field in this way where you look at them almost with the same respect and kind of the same eye, and then it becomes this big party, right? It's like, you go to a party and there's celebrities, but there's also ne'er do wells, and everybody's comingling, and it just makes for a funner time.

So, to get back to “Rosebud,” Katie and I would have lists of these things, like the corner cabinet, the blanket chest, and the rocker was on there, but while L.A. Door was alive and well, we never really got to it. L.A. Door ended, but I continue to be inspired by the way that we worked and our whole approach to celebrating American furniture, so I wanted to get to the rocker. I was looking at a lot of rockers, everything from Shaker rockers to Danish rockers by Hans Wegner to production rockers that were produced in large quantities in places like North Carolina. There's just such a broad variety, and they all have their own kind of lines. I was looking at this one rocker, a production rocker from North Carolina, inspired by Shakers, but not made by Shakers. This one was armless, and all the beauty, all of the information, all of its DNA, was in the back section. The finials, the bentwood backrest, the curvature of the posts, the shape of the rocker - all the drama was right there. The seat was just sort of this box that was attached to it - also quite beautiful, but it wasn't really adding information that wasn't already contained in the back and the rocker.

So “Rosebud” arrived just from sketching, looking at images and books and online and picking and choosing my favorite elements from all of these different rockers and putting them into one drawing of one object. I definitely wasn’t setting out to make some sort of a sculpture artwork; really, I was just processing information and sketching to find out what I was interested in as far as rockers, trying to kind of reveal something to myself. So, I ended up with this sketch of what became “Rosebud,” and I was like, “Oh, I like that. And I want to make it.”

CS: Well, it's interesting, because although you may not have been thinking of “Rosebud” specifically in terms of formal artmaking, it does seem to diverge from your usual ways of working. For example, there's the question of surface treatments: Where so many of your prior pieces emphasized the natural traits of the materials and employed them almost as graphic elements, here you made a point of producing a very sleek, opaque finish that obscured the wood grain. Can you talk a bit about how and why you achieved that effect? 

DM: Yeah. So, I did show it to Katie, even though L.A. Door was sort of at its end; I also showed it to Ben and Heidi of Marta Gallery, who had shown L.A. Door in the past. We were talking about how to finish it - should it be raw wood? Should it be glossy? Should it be painted? If so, what color? - and I remember Heidi and Katie were both like, “Oh, it should be black.” And I was like, “Well, I don't know about that. That sounds a little too design-y or contemporary.” So, I tried all these other things, all these other colors and finishes, and nothing was really sticking, so eventually, I just tried black - and they were right, it should be black. But it wasn't quite that simple, because the wood that I was using was ash, which I was using because several of the components, like the backrest and the posts, are slightly bent, and ash is the classic wood for bending. Its grain structure just lends itself to bending. However, it's a very open-pored wood, so if you paint it, you really see the wood grain pop, and that felt a little bit distracting to me. So, you paint it black, but you see all this wood grain, and it just feels like painted wood. So, I tried something that I hadn't done before, where you mix up spackle and mix it up with water to make a paste, which you wipe into the pores, and then you sand it off. It fills the grain, so when you paint over it, you get a smooth finish with no wood grain showing through. I found that that really sort of flattened the piece, and made it almost like an image of itself, if that makes sense. There were no distractions anymore; you weren't thinking about the fact that this was made in wood, it was just about the silhouette and the shape, and that allowed for a sort of concept to come through free of any noise. You can take in the idea a little bit more easily, I think. 

CS: Yeah. I think it adds to this overall sense of decontextualization, where you have forms and materials removed from both function and association. It renders them newly anonymous, in a way, which kind of frees up the viewer to consider the object on its own terms, and as a result, winds up opening things to a broader range of potential readings.

DM: Yes. I think it's two things that do that: it’s what we just talked about with the paint, and it's also the removal of the seat. 

CS: Right. I remember you telling me that in sketching out the piece, you felt like you'd landed on something “pure,” and I have to think that a big part of that had to do with the removal of the seat, which essentially means the removal of functionality.

DM: Yeah, right. 

CS: Speaking of sketching, is that your usual process for developing ideas? What kind of steps are taken ahead of the physical production of a new work? 

DM: Well, it starts with a background in craft and knowing how things are made, so that when you're going to a museum or flipping through a book or scrolling on Instagram, you're looking at objects and you have a sense for how they're made. I feel like that's sort of critical, and then you start drawing. I'm not a very good drawer, but I'm okay. I can sketch and get my ideas on paper well enough to communicate to myself or other people. Sometimes it's late at night, sometimes it's in the morning with coffee. And I always run it by people. I feel like I've had more success and more fun the more I take myself out of the center of things and put myself more in a circle with other people and the history of it all. Obviously, there was the collaboration with Katie, but I run ideas past friends and family, Ben and Heidi. And then, of course, in dealing with historical designs, you're sort of in conversation with a whole history of designers and builders. You're, you're talking to them about how they made things, the choices they made, and you’re adding to a bigger conversation. So, the less I feel like I'm an isolated designer drawing in my kitchen, the better. 

CS: Yeah. Actually, that's part of what I find compelling about your continued references to Shaker furniture - not only with “Rosebud,” but with the drying racks you showed with L.A. Door at Marta last year. The fact that you were drawn to this specific section of a rocker because it resonated with you aesthetically, as a form, is really interesting, just because Shaker furniture is so often framed in terms that emphasize the austerity, the practicality, the technical precision, and then equate that with their religious ideology. But as you've said, within their approach, there was still allowance for aesthetic decision-making, for really interesting visual asymmetries, as well as for allusions to outside design traditions - which makes sense, because when you think about it, those early generations of Shaker craftspeople were converts who had previously lived and worked in the outside world; many of them would have been familiar with the neoclassical motifs that were in fashion at that time, and I think that is reflected in the items they produced. So, to look at their work through that lens, being able to point to these aesthetic elements and references, and acknowledging the way that certain aspects of Shaker design have been echoed by later generations of artists, from Charles Sheeler to George Nakashima, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, all the way to contemporary designers like you or Green River Projects and so on, is really interesting, specifically because it situates that earlier work in a living tradition, as opposed to some insular, stand-alone field of production, you know?

DM: Yeah, definitely. I had never really thought about it that way. That's really interesting. 

CS: Have you ever seen Shaker furniture in person? Have you ever visited a landmark village, that sort of thing? 

DM: No, I haven't gone to the big ones. I've seen some of the original pieces in museums and they are amazing. Why do you ask? 

CS: Just because from what you've told me in prior conversations, it sounds like traveling and engaging with works up close is a big part of your research process. 

DM: Oh, for sure. Yeah, not nearly as much as I would like to, but I feel like looking at Shaker furniture is this amazing palette cleanser. You know, we look at everything now: We move around from Danish to postmodern to French modernism; we look at a million different things in a given day, and then we get obsessed with stuff and we'll look at one furniture movement for weeks and just be like, “This is the best thing,” and then those interests shift. But I feel like whenever I come back to Shaker furniture, it’s just like, “Take a breath. Let your shoulders down. It’s not that complicated, guys. Stop overthinking it. Beauty's a much quieter thing. Let go of your ego. Stop trying so hard.” And then you get bored of that. [laughs] You want to flex that ego or go out and party. But it's an amazing thing to return to, I find.

CS: Yeah, absolutely. So, getting back to “Rosebud,” another defining element of the piece is its potential for kinetic movement. You have presented movable objects in the past - I'm thinking, for instance, of the rocking chair that you showed at the Neutra VDL House in 2021 - but here, you're dealing with motion without necessarily pointing towards an overt function. It'd be great to hear a bit more about that aspect of the piece. 

DM: When I think about its movement, I think about how it brings life to it. Something that I didn't really intend or anticipate with this is that to me, and to people who have seen it, it's easy to anthropomorphize “Rosebud.” That's been a common conversation that other people have brought up to me. What also resonates with me is the fact that it rocks and it moves, but when it's at rest, it has meaning, too, because it's not moving, even though it can. It can actually feel a little bit sad.

A rocking chair is almost like a dog, right? It’s waiting for its master to activate it, like, “Let's go outside,” or whatever. A rocking chair is just sort of waiting around all day, until work is over and its sitter sits down with a cup of whatever and starts using it. Then it's serving its purpose, it's feeling useful, it's feeling the love of its counterpart. “Rosebud,” when it's static, is sad. It's limited. It's literally unable to accept love because it is missing a part; it's unable to have human connection because it doesn't have a seat. And even when you move it, it's sort of odd, because it's kind of just spinning its wheels, which I think is also pretty relatable. 

CS: Is this a mode of working you'd like to explore further? Do you see “Rosebud” as a one-off, or could it be the first in a potential edition or series?

DM: I wouldn't make another that was exactly the same. It's definitely the only one. But I can definitely envision there being more that have their own personalities and that might feel like siblings to “Rosebud,” like a little friend group. I would love to do that. I have other priorities right now, in terms of stuff that I'm making, but I could definitely see it being a larger family of work.

CS: “Rosebud” was recently included in the “Rites of Spring” group show at Marta. Can we talk a little bit about how you chose to install the piece? 

DM: Yes. So, my main thought with the installation was that it should be on a circular plinth. I find a chair's best angle is often the rear quarter of it – so, looking at it not directly from the back, but to the back and a little bit from the side. For whatever reason, I love that angle of a chair. I feel like the front is usually the least interesting, though not as a rule. Like, Hans Wegner, who in my mind is the best chair designer ever, his chairs look amazing from every single angle. But in general, I think chairs should be viewed at 360 degrees, so to me, the circular plinth was a necessary feature of the installation, along with its location in the show, putting it adjacent to the oak bow that I made that hangs on a wall. Being able to look at those next to one other was important. But I also think putting it up on a plinth actually discouraged people from activating it. Anyone was allowed to, but I think the plinth sort of encouraged people to ask or to just assume that they couldn't. 

CS: As you mentioned, along with “Rosebud,” the “Rites of Spring” show included a wall mounted work that you'd produced in the shape of a decorative bow. The form itself is based on a found object from a thrift store, right? 

DM: Yes. My friend Bianca Stilwell is a professional furniture and art dealer, and she’s made a niche for herself exploring thrift stores and estate sales in the Southern California area, although she also travels to places like Arizona. When she finds something interesting, she'll get on her stories and be like, “Hey, I'm at this thrift store, and I just found this crazy thing. Does anybody want it?” So, she found this oak bow and posted it, and I was like, “I want that.” 

The form of the bow I made is literally this exact format. I took this thing apart and made templates of all the pieces out of red oak, which is the lesser of the two oaks. It’s a lot cheaper than white oak, for example. Red oak is what you see in a lot of thrift store furniture; white oak is what you see in fancy homes. Then I stained the oak to give it that sort of brown-honey color that you see in a lot of thrift store furniture. 

I wound up hanging it up in my house, and I just lived with this bow for a while. At first, I was hanging a tote bag on it, but then I was like, “Why am I putting my shabby, ugly tote bag on it? This thing is too beautiful.” So, I began to use it as a decorative object. I loved it, and people who came over loved it - it's just this undeniably positive, sweet, kind of optimistic object. So, I decided I wanted to make it and share it with people, because it felt meant to be shared. I wasn’t making any money - I was selling them for basically just enough to cover my costs and a little bit of my time. I probably made twenty of them. I tried painting them in bright colors, like a candy red or buttery yellow, but the oak was always my favorite.

The other thing about the bow was that it wasn't labeled or signed or anything. The longer I had it, the more I was like, “Where did this thing come from? Who made this?” I would just sort of imagine where it came from. I mean, it was clearly made in someone's home studio or garage or something. I sort of imagine it being made in the ‘80s or ‘90s. It smacks of the Midwest, even though it might not be from the Midwest. 

CS: Yeah, definitely. As someone raised in Chicago, I’d say it has a very “Early ‘90s, Michael's Craft Store” feel to it.

DM: Yeah, exactly. I shop at JOANN all the time for stuff like that. [laughs]

CS: In my mind, it feels like the bow is coming from the same world as the La-Z-Boy recliners that you presented with L.A. Door. 

DM: Yeah, it's easy to see them in the same home. I'm really glad you said that, because I think a commonality that the two objects share are the unpretentiousness and just a genuine desire for comfort. LA-Z-Boys aren’t anything to look at, they're not particularly beautiful, but the experience of sitting in one is amazing. I just think they suffer from terrible branding. The La-Z-Boy company is over a hundred years old; it’s a Michigan company that grew up adjacent to the auto industry, and I think that’s reflected in how the chairs are made. I think the company held a contest where people sent in their ideas to name the chair (sort of an early form of crowdsourcing), and apparently La-Z-Boy won out. The name contributes to this cliché of it as this chair for a slovenly dude – literally, a lazy boy – but actually, the word I would use to describe them would be restorative. You can get in a La-Z-Boy, recline it and work on your laptop for four hours, and when you get up, you're not clutching your lower back. You spring right up and feel great. You know, we could get into ergonomics if you want to…

CS: Sure. 

DM: In my mind, there are two theories of ergonomics. One would be a chaise lounge by someone like Bruno Mathsson. He made these beautiful bentwood chairs that were wrapped in cotton webbing and have these amazing lines, but the thing about his chairs is that there's one way to sit in it. It fits your body perfectly, as long as you stay in one position. It does not rock. It doesn't have a lever that changes positions. You couldn't really move around in it. So, you can recline, and it supports you perfectly, but now you cannot move - whereas a La-Z-Boy can recline, but they also rock. It’s actually a natural evolution of a rocking chair. You can sit up, you can recline halfway, you can recline all the way, you can rock. You can move around in it, and I feel like comfort over a period of time requires that you move around a little bit. You can't do that with the Bruno Mathsson designs. So, the La-Z-Boy is functional, but it’s not attractive, and the fact that it's not attractive is a big reason that it has never really broken into bougie design spaces. There have been attempts to make them more elegant - I think Todd Oldham might have done a design for La-Z-Boy - and usually, they’ll add a weird tapered wooden leg or something, trying to give it a mid-century feel, something a little sleeker. But in doing so, they ruin the comfort of it for the sake of elegance. 

CS: Right. In thinking back on your L.A. Door pieces, the interventions were pretty minimal - maybe some reupholstering or updating the handles, but nothing fundamental.

DM: That's right. Before I met Katie, I was collecting La-Z-Boys, thinking, “All right, no one's done anything with the La-Z-Boy. I'm going to do something cool with the La-Z-Boy.” And honestly, I think I was taking a more “Todd Oldham” approach, where I was trying to make it look cool, and I just couldn't. So, I had it on the back burner forever, but then I met Katie. I was talking to her about it, and she was like, “Just reupholster it in something cool, and maybe we can make a new handle or something.” That was the key idea: Don't fight the design, celebrate it. Celebrate how schlubby it is, the overflowing cushion of it. We learned how to do that together. 

But to bring it back to the bow, it's just so easy to see them in the same space together. It’s funny, because I think the bow is immediately aesthetically beautiful, whereas the La-Z-Boy might not be, but somehow, they're speaking the same language. Both of them care about you. 

CS: Right. They're both eager to please. 

DM: Yeah. You look at that bow, and it almost has open arms – and a La-Z-Boy literally has open arms that you sit between. 

CS: Right, and although one comes from the crafts world and the other from mainstream consumer retail, both items would also seem to fall squarely beyond the scope of taste and aesthetics that distinguishes so-called fine art and design - which brings us to the idea of amateurism, which I know is something you're quite interested in. 

DM: Yeah, I think that’s what I'm most interested in right now. It's an interesting word, “amateur.” I think the original spelling is A-M-A-T-O-R. I’m not sure how you pronounce it, but it means “lover,” or “to love,” and I think that's sort of key. That meaning has changed over time; it kind of feels like it changed along with the progression of capitalism. So, if its original meaning was “lover,” it became something closer to “non-professional,” someone who doesn't do it for a living.

CS: A non-expert. 

DM: Yeah, someone who doesn't fully know what they're doing, or doesn't get paid to do it; someone who wouldn't be recognized as a standard bearer. It becomes pejorative, even to the point where it comes to mean “unskilled” or someone prone to doing shoddy work. And I think that's all well and good. On the one hand, it's sort of a bastardization and a journey of the word from this beautiful thing to this pejorative - but on the other hand, I like that, because it kind of carves out its own space outside of capitalism, outside of expertise, and it takes on more of a folk meaning. There are no more rules, in a way. There's more room to play around. It doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not being made to be sold or evaluated by someone who might be selling it or critiquing it or reviewing it. I think that energy comes out in the bow.

CS: Definitely - and it seems like these ideas are at the heart of a new project that you're in the process of launching. Maybe you can give us a sense of what you're working on. 

DM: Yeah. I'd like to explore this world of amateur creators, but how to do that is difficult. You can scour eBay and you can scour thrift stores. So, I'm going to start to travel later in the summer, going to yard sales in the Midwest, going to estate sales and thrift stores out there, just trying to find objects that have that beautiful amateur energy. I mean, if I could find the actual makers of these things, that would be first prize. I would love to meet these people, interview these people, potentially collaborate with these people, make work that's in conversation with theirs, possibly show our work together in some sort of context that could be local to them, or here in a gallery in Los Angeles, or some combination of the two. That would be the dream, but if I can't find anybody, I'll just have to do what I can with the objects that I do find. So really, the goal of the project is to commune and collaborate with amateur artwork, and to share that with as many people as possible. 

CS: I remember you telling me that there was something about the design of the bow that made it feel like it “belongs to all of us,” which ultimately made you feel comfortable with replicating the piece despite not knowing who its author may have been. 

DM: Right. A lot of it has to do with the intent. Like I said, when I first was making those bows, I was not making any money. The intent really was to share, and I've always been upfront about the fact that it's not my design. In a way, I think about the bow like a blanket chest or a highboy or a rocker. It's almost like a classic form. When Katie and I would do riffs on these classic forms, we sort of saw it like country music, where these pieces of furniture are like old country standards, like “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” With those songs, other people’s covers of them are almost as important to the song's place in the culture as the original. I think that's something that Katie and I honed in on, and it's something that I still carry with me. Whenever I'm confused about what it is I'm trying to do or look for or make, I return to this question of, “what are you celebrating?” That's kind of my center, and as long as I'm celebrating something, I feel good about whatever comes out.

CS: Motion in Field is presented by Marta Los Angeles and produced by Christopher Schreck. Our theme music is by Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. You can read and listen to all of our conversations by subscribing to Marta's email newsletter via their website, marta.la. Follow us on Instagram at cdschreck and marta.losangeles, and be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.