Cathy McClure: Dispossessed

What lurks under the pelts of your kids' mechanical plush toys? Betty Bowen Award–winning artist and metalworker Cathy McClure took a pair of scissors to find out. Skinned, these cuddly cartoon characters and animal friends—abandoned by their owners to thrift stores, where the artist picks them up—turn into clacking, cawing, snapping armies of gold-plated robots. These toys are "dispossessed" of their cultural moment and the affections that made them relevant. As for us, we're left with the detritus of our imagined futures. As CoCA Gallery writes: "The Digital Kids generation’s post-toy life leans more toward apathy and bewilderment at a screen over jubilance and exhilaration found in play."