Portico, 2025

Portico, 2025,  Ian McMahon

Newburgh-based artist George Ian McMahon presents Portico, a large-scale, site-specific sculpture created as part of the Terrain Biennial Newburgh 2025, on view through November 15.

The work transforms the unique elevated porch of 73 Grand Street into an ephemeral architectural intervention. Through a process of inflating custom plastic molds within the existing structure and layering industrial plaster, McMahon produces a delicate yet monumental self-supporting shell. Once the molds are removed, what remains is a ghostly impression of pressurized air—an extended moment of motion, stilled.

At 42' x 14' x 10', Portico sits in both dialogue and tension with the crumbling façade of the historic building. Its plaster form appears suspended in time, but as the piece is materially and structurally tied to the architecture, it will decay alongside it. The result is a meditation on fragility, endurance, and the beauty of impermanence—an ethereal monument to life in ruins.

“Portico is both a stand-alone sculpture and an inseparable extension of its environment,” notes McMahon. “Its presence is monumental, yet its inevitable decay underscores the fleeting nature of architectural and human ambition alike.” 

Like the work of graffiti artists who claim public space as their canvas, Portico brings art directly to the streets of Newburgh—accessible to anyone, at any time. Installed on a residential façade and viewable entirely from the exterior, the piece requires no ticket, no formal entry, and no prescribed viewing hours. It stands as an open invitation to the community and passersby alike, embodying the spirit of art for everyone—a public gesture of creation that exists in dialogue with its neighborhood.