Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, Wrapped Objects, Park Life Gallery

Unwrapping Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan

By Tamsin Smith

This year would be the 90th for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists of monumental, ephemeral public art installations. Some of their most iconic projects also celebrate milestones in 2025: the 20th anniversary of The Gates (New York City), the 30th anniversary of Wrapped Reichstag (Berlin), and the 40th anniversary of The Pont Neuf Wrapped (Paris). Their historic collaboration transformed everyday objects and places into highly accessible and memorable scenes of delight for everyday people, as well as museum and gallery goers.

Before they surrounded the islands of Miami’s Biscayne Bay in pink or ran a fabric fence through the Northern California countryside, Cristo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped simple relics of modern life. He began by wandering through Paris, collecting random crates and cans, bottles and barrels to cover in canvas and rope. It is these early explorations that inspired artists Kelsey McClellan and Michelle Maguire to collaborate on a series of photographs, exhibited at Park Life Gallery, along with a limited-edition book.

Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, Fruit Cocktail, Two bottles, three cans, plastic, latex, rope 2025, 16x20” archival pigment print

Wrapped Objects is a revealing show. Pun intended. It is an homage and a reprisal. Mundane items are metamorphized by two artists working together to present a whole greater than the sum of its creative parts. Beyond the homage to the chrysalis re-formation of reality, there is a rousing freshness and vigor to McClellan and Maguire’s variations, as happens when a composer samples a melody, beat, or phrase from a familiar tune. In this process of reinvention, Maguire and McClellan turn the shrouded and mysterious quality of Cristo and Jeanne-Claude’s early wrappings into something more modern and mischievous. A good example of this is “Mouse”, in which an alarm bell is encased in claret-colored organza and bound by bright orange leather cording to wink at the murine mascot of the Walt Disney Company.

Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, Mouse, Alarm bell, organza, leather cord 2025, 16x20” archival pigment print

For source material, Maguire and McClellan followed a process similar to their muses by letting their eye be drawn towards interesting silhouettes in the random jumble of flea markets. The practice echoes Christo’s, as his echoes the Situationists of the 1950s and 60s, an avant-garde movement of artists and social revolutionaries who developed the theory of dérive (French for “drift”). Dérive was a political act. It involved taking an unplanned journey through urban space. By refusing state-planned and consumer-driven paths, the Situationists sought liberation from the capitalistic strictures of urban life.

They would allow whim and chance encounter to guide them, thus unmaking imposed rules of order and returning the landscape to a place of play and possibility.

Maguire and McClellan bring this sense of fun into their titles, unshackling language from the expected norms in “serious” art making. See the rubber and rafia embraced roller skate of It’s Getting Wheely Hot!

Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, It’s Getting Wheely Hot!, Roller skate, rubber, raffia 2025, 16x20” archival pigment print

Nonetheless, there’s a serious ripple to all this revelry. How often in daily life are we invited to defend the free flow of creativity against the regimented march of a market-driven world? Christo and Jeanne-Claude were deliberate in their mission to allow their art to circulate freely like a gift, rather than being hoarded as a commodity. They refused outside sponsorship or public funding and underwrote the expense of their temporary, free-to-the-public installations themselves, through the sale of preparatory drawings and collages. It was a perfect illustration of the ancient gift economy that Lewis Hyde wrote about in his brilliant book, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. For Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the public’s appreciation served as their payment, along with an augmented sense of interconnectedness and enriched community spirit.

Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, Lady Liberty, Violin, wool, cotton cord 2025, 16x20” archival pigment print

In “Lady Liberty,” MacLellan and Maguire wrap a violin in the soft enfolding textures of wool and cotton. Before it was discarded for the artists to encounter in their wanderings, it was likely a finely-tuned and lovingly-played instrument capable of conjuring euphoria and pathos. The print’s title, the torch-like shape of the violin’s scroll and peg box, and the green color of the wool blanket all bring the Statue of Liberty to the forefront of the viewer’s imagination. The verdigris patina on Ellis Island’s Lady Liberty is produced through the natural process of oxidation. Over its first 30 years, the statue transformed from a penny red-brown to green. It’s this alteration that now shields the underlying copper from erosion. The statue itself has embodied a protective shield for generations of huddled masses yearning to breathe free in a land of new beginnings. As I wonder how we are to protect the United States and Lady Liberty’s honor from further erosion, I’m hearing the first violins of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” begin to build their melancholy melody.

I am grateful to these artists and to Park Life Gallery for bringing Christo and Jeanne-Claude back into my consciousness, and for opening another window, another gate, another way to look forward. A gift is something to be wrapped and unwrapped. It can also be re-wrapped and re-gifted. In a commodified culture, regifting is viewed as a “cheap” thing to do. By unpacking and recovering the work of artists who came before them, Maguire and McClellan invite us to check our assumptions about the drift of creativity itself. Is it a fountain from which we can all sip and in which we are all invited to revel; is it a chain that requires both past and future to hold value; or is it merely the outline of a present in which we spend far too little time being exactly that?

(L) Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, It’s For You, Telephone, nylon, cotton twine 2025, 16x20” archival pigment print (R) Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan, Wrapped Objects , Digitally printed, wrapped in nylon and rope 2025, 7 x 8.5” Edition of 70

MICHELLE MAGUIRE / KELSEY McCLELLAN: WRAPPED OBJECTS, Photos inspired by the early work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, October 3rd - November 9th, 2025, at Park Life Gallery, San Francisco.