Malik McKoy: from architecture dropout to city builder

Malik McKoy is building a city, but he’s still reinforcing his foundations.

A multimedia artist with a penchant for colliding the surreal and mundane, McKoy’s original career path had him enrolled at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson) to study architecture, but he soon found his program’s emphasis on codes and standards stifling and promptly dropped out.

Registering at OCAD shortly afterward, McKoy picked up a bachelor of fine arts in drawing and painting instead, topping off his formal education with a postgraduate certificate in game art and animation from Seneca College. 

But McKoy’s not done with architecture just yet. The latest addition to his portfolio — a hyper-lively investigation into the minutiae everyday life that pulls viewers in with vibrant colours, abstract figures, rounded forms, plushy attributes, and plastic toy-like textures and shapes while the same exaggerated features expose their sinister underlying realities — has him constructing an augmented reality cityscape for Hypercity, launching next month with the beginning of Long Winter’s 2022/2023 season.

Claustrophobically crowding the viewer’s phone screen with an omnidirectional field of skyscrapers, the project, First and Last, is a response to the city’s housing landscape, but McKoy says it’s also distinctly personal.

Living an hour east of Toronto in Pickering, McKoy has been travelling downtown for school for years, but rising rents have locked him out of living there, rapid development adding insult to injury.

“As someone trying to move to the city myself, I just find it more and more difficult as the years go by, with the increasing rent, and I was really thinking about who can even access these spaces, old or new?” he complains. “The rent’s just sky high and there’s no room for upward mobility. So with that in mind I’m basically trying to create an AR piece that simulates that feeling, having highrise buildings that recede into the distance from all sides of the screen so it kind of frames the real-life environment.

‘First And Last’ Concept art (Courtesy Malik McKoy).

“It’s sort of like a one-point perspective in a way,” he continues about the AR experience. “The highrise buildings are rising towards the centrepoint of the screen while leaving a hole open for the real life environment. And then on these highrise buildings will be windows — or you can call them screens — that will basically take the camera feed of the real life environment and distort them and have effects over top of them to distort what you’re looking at.”

Like the market often does, the application will restrict the viewer’s access to the windowshopping experience.

“You can see what’s in front of you through the screen, but you can’t access it through all the distortions and glitches,” he says. As Hypercity approaches, he’s also toying with programming different animations to cycle through the windows as viewers tap their touchscreens, building in transience and ephemerality to the hostile architecture.

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More cyber-expressionist than photoreal, McKoy says his work typically stems from feeling, treating his art “like a visual diary” rather than grounding it in research or critical traditions.

“It’s very self-referential in that way, where I refer to how I navigate suburban spaces as a Black queer man. So that comes up often, but it’s sort of unconscious.”

McKoy similarly found himself bucking against the technical emphasis in his schooling, preferring to explore technologies that allowed him to free up his expression rather than bog them down in procedure. Following his disdain for architecture school’s emphasis on formal routine, he found himself escaping the colder sections of his painting program drawing animations in Photoshop. Going a step further, he says a 3D modeling elective that was licensing the animation and rendering software Cinema 4D was the key that opened a world of abstract expression for him, abandoning anatomical references to indulge his animation.

“It sort of allowed me to be free and just think of ways of drawing that I hadn’t done before,” he says about Cinema 4D. “I just allowed myself to play around and [indulge my] creativity and be openminded to imperfections.”

McKoy’s efforts to separate himself from strict regimen and tedium are perhaps what make his obsession with the mundane the most intriguing: la grande odalisque, a 2021 digital sculpture, explores the grotesque lengths people go to represent themselves online daily, a figure contorting themself under a set of ring lights; in Code Switch, a series he developed for a solo residency with Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery this year, bodies are oversized, wrapping themselves around their property, even detached from themselves in bizarre amputations.

“My everyday life in Ajax and Pickering is not exciting, so really it’s just me trying to be real and talk about what my genuine experience is on this planet but glamourise it and package it in a way that’s interesting to the viewer, with bright colours and twisted forms.”

“NumberNounDrive," oil on canvas, 2022. Part of McKoy’s 'Code Switch' series created in residence at Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

There’s tremendous range from one piece to the next, but McKoy insists it comes from the same place.

“I’m still just tapping into that same process.”

It’s all emanating from a centre of intimacy and self-reference, but McKoy doesn’t feel boxed in. Working across mediums, new skills gained in one area are reflected in another, continuously adding to his toolkit, building outward. After a few experiments with AR, eventually he’d like to try his hand at VR, creating expansive environments audiences can immerse themselves in.

“When you’re working on these 3D images, there’s so much depth in the software that people don’t see through a flat image. So I want the user to revolve around the work and and walk around, find themselves in a whole world built on just my work. It’s just a lot of HTML and coding I have to learn. But it’s on the list.”

Malik McKoy’s First and Last is a part of Long Winter’s Hypercity programming, running November 2022 through March 2023. McKoy will also discuss First and Last in a virtual artist talk taking place 7-8 PM EST on November 24 (register here).