Kathleen McDermott: Repair Shop

April 12 – May 25, 2025

Kathleen McDermott is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in installation and sculpture. She combines her knowledge of fabrication with open source code and hardware to build a language of absurdity that merges new media, design, performance, and video. She is interested in technologies that extend and highlight embodied knowledge, and that challenge narrow conceptions of use, waste and productivity. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, The Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, the Wende Museum in LA, and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; and has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Dezeen. She is currently an Industry Assistant Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in the Integrated Design & Media Program. 

Repair Shop will be an interactive exhibition in which community members are invited to submit formerly precious electronic objects and other heirlooms for “repair.” If an object is accepted, the owners will be asked to acknowledge that if the object is returned to them, the form and function will have been significantly altered. In advance of, and over the course of the exhibition, McDermott and a rotating list of invited artist collaborators will rework found and submitted objects, combining them with metallic spray paint, fabric, motors, and inflation, to produce a visually unified cast of “characters.” The artists themselves will also act as “characters” in the exhibition, wearing uniforms, and operating among pre-fabricated objects, signage and projected video that establishes the visual tone of the space––a playful and experimental place for seriously considering the lifespan of objects, and how and when they are considered to have “value,” especially in the context of work.