Focusing on the Living Experience—making & consuming, loss, the passage of time—J.J. McCracken constructs immersive installations. McCracken’s landscapes are composed of earth materials and activated by sound, smell, taste, and living models that move through them, focused on tasks they’ve been assigned. Sometimes, repeating cycles of productive activity yield accumulation—and then things fall apart. Other times, consumption is incessant but drones on, unable to satisfy. In McCracken’s work, there is (so far) always a foil for the notion of achievement, and there is (so far) always a reflection of the cycle of life. 

Hunger, Philadelphia, a recent project, uses geophagy (clay-eating) as a launching point for a visual poem about need. Geophagia occurs worldwide, problematic in countries suffering severe food crises. During the exhibition, clay-covered models move through an arid, monochromatic landscape eating clay casts of fruits and vegetables. The excessive consumption of a visually bountiful but non-nutritive food substitute is central to the main idea of the project. 

Older projects include Living Sculpture, a series of separate but interacting vignette stages built to house individual performances. Task-based activity cycles through making/un-making. Time markers that form flexible but regular intervals are made visible/audible through labor and product, and then through subsequent decomposition. Time itself appears to progress, invert, and suspend simultaneously.

Through an ongoing series of sketches she calls Slip/Skin Studies, McCracken explores thoughts about consumption and loss. There is often an attempt to recapture something missing, or a grasping at something just out of reach. Witness to the Passing of the World uses repetitive searching and discarding, and closes with a final act of gathering what is leftover as the action begins to subside. In the end, the discarded becomes the embraced. 

J.J. McCracken received a B.A. in Anthropology from The College of William and Mary in 1995, an M.F.A. in Studio Art from The George Washington University in 2005, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. McCracken is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, recently including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2011), a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2011), and a Puffin Foundation Grant (2011).

Hunger, Philadelphia was commissioned by The Clay Studio and independent curator John Perreault. The project received support for development and planning from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for the Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts. Additional project funding was provided in part by the William Penn Foundation (2010) and by a grant from the Harpo Foundation with sponsorship by the Arlington Arts Center (2009).

McCracken has also received a Chenven Foundation Award (2008) and both an Individual Artist Fellowship and a Small Projects Grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (2008). Among other older awards, her STASIS project received “Best In Show” in the Ceramic Objects/Conceptual Material exhibition during the “Crafting Content” symposium at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (2008).

J.J. McCracken has exhibited at venues across the United States and is currently building large scale projects with the generous support of a position as Artist-In-Residence at Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, MD.