White Elephant

White Elephant is based on the shape of an old air-conditioning duct and fashioned entirely from copper. The choice of material is significant: copper has a long history of application in both architecture and the decorative arts. While the metal has a certain noble and timeless quality, here it has been used to fashion an object that typically remains hidden in everyday life – concealed on a rooftop, in a basement or behind a machine room door. By welding this anonymous, functional object from copper sheets and giving it legs, McBride has stripped it of any practical context. It becomes a sculpture that feels simultaneously familiar and odd.

The form and medium conjure associations with the minimalist art of the 1960s and 70s: clean geometric lines, an industrial aesthetic and the absence of an individual artistic signature. Yet White Elephant is not entirely divorced from reality; it refers to the world around us, full of the uniform infrastructure and standardized urban forms that we pass by every day without ever truly seeing them. HVAC systems, parking garages and HVAC units are the unsung backbone of the built environment. They regulate our comfort and shape our movements, yet are aesthetically overlooked. By taking such a system and isolating it, enlarging it or fabricating it from a costly material, McBride forces the viewer to really see the thing – and question it.

That tension between what is visible and invisible is an essential element of McBride’s work, while the title adds an extra layer of irony. A ‘white elephant’ is an object whose costs exceed its benefits – something difficult to maintain and hard to get rid of, but also too valuable to simply discard. McBride applies the term to an object that in the real world is just the opposite: purely functional, visually unobtrusive, cheap and easily replaced. By crafting it in copper and giving it the status of an artwork, she literally turns the unit into a luxury object, while also posing questions about what we consider valuable and what we see as art.