Having spent the prior ten years of their relationship in pursuit of individual careers, in 1996 Barbara McCarren and Jud Fine began work as McCarren/Fine. Initially the collaborative effort grew out of the all-consuming nature of conceiving, planning and materializing public art commissions. The team has executed several works including Waterline a two square block mixed use development in Huntington Beach, CA, Split Mound for the San Francisco Zoo, Mais a 23-acre interactive park in Long beach, CA, Modestopo, the civic center plaza for the City of Modesto and Stanislaus County, CA and both the Central Library and Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. They, declaratively, extended their collaboration to their studio practice with a 2002 exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand, that was later expanded with new work for the 2005 show, Currency, at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. Together McCarren/Fine have completed at least 28 public and numerous studio projects. These works are solutions generated by the context and the conditions of the specific site they occupy. The thread of site-specificity as a desired condition of public commissions is also visible through consideration in McCarren/Fine’s studio production. In their working approach, site is defined not only by its physical and geological conditions, its historic, current and evolving function, its use in relation to human condition, but also by its continuous, connective relationship to the ever-expanding totality of the adjacent. The idea that committed exchange as collaboration is inherently a challenging negotiation, is sometimes subject and always a subtext of their work.
As individual artists. Jud Fine and Barbara McCarren are poles apart. Fine's work often begins with a clear, concise informational fact that, with research, reiteration, extension and supposition presents as a multifaceted, sometimes contradictory complexity. McCarren strives to present a clarity in her work, a totality that is a synthesis of her own struggle to comprehend and evolve a new sense of the profound complexities inherent in her various subjects which are often derived from literature. In short, Fine takes a clarity and presents a complexity while McCarren takes complexity and produces a clarity.
It is through this opposition that McCarren and Fine perpetually attempt to collaborate on public commissions and studio projects. It is by no means a natural or easy effort to work from opposite positions. Their choice of subject inevitably parallels the significant role that forces of opposition play in the process of creation. Their work not only integrates, but also discerns their individual artistic practices while interweaving their subject interest and aesthetic discourse.
View CV
