Sara MacKillop's exhibition "The Cutaway View" at Good Weather in Chicago presents sculptures made from humble analog materials like blank wall calendars, empty shopping bags, and gift wrapping. The London-based artist alters these objects with minimal interventions—such as surgically cut holes in shopping bags to accommodate vinyl records—drawing attention to the ephemera and texture of retail culture. Her series "Calendar Houses" (2021–ongoing) uses archive boxes and wall calendars to create miniature modernist dwellings that critique systems of order and self-optimization.
MacKillop's work matters because it offers a quiet, subliminal critique of contemporary pressures around productivity, self-improvement, and consumer culture, predating current anxieties about AI and digital overload. By focusing on the emotional and material byproducts of analog systems of organization and display, she highlights how these seemingly neutral tools reinforce the very problems they claim to solve. Her practice resonates with broader cultural conversations about burnout, the myth of the "better self," and the fading hope for genuine individual meaning within corporate and consumer frameworks.