Interdisciplinary media artist working across documentary, installation, sound, performance, and participatory media.
About.
McKinley Argyle is a documentary director, cinematographer, and intermedia artist based in Denton, Texas, whose work explores stories of counterculture and community. She leverages the power of documentary filmmaking to bring complex stories and vital knowledge into the public eye, compelling viewers to think critically and engage with the world beyond the mainstream.
She recently completed the documentary A Place We Can Go, which chronicles how the iconic punk venue, info shop, and lending library "1919 Hemphill" became the target of a coordinated far-right campaign and ultimately closed its doors in 2019. In its aftermath, the film follows the people continuing to build independent music venues across North Texas, revealing how these spaces provide far more than live music. They offer refuge, belonging, and community for those who have long felt marginalized.
Currently, she is in production on an experimental documentary titled God's Green Turf, which explores the foundational history that has established lawns as a dominant practice in American Culture, tying them to abstractions of the “American Dream,” and thus binding private landscaping practices with character value, quietly serving as an enforcement of conformity. The documentary will then explore how lawns negatively impact the climate, specific to the water supply, declining wildlife and pollinator populations, public health, and climate change. The goal of the film is to critically examine how participation in consumer culture strains resources and furthers environmental degradation. The film shifts the paradigm from an individual exploration to a systemic one, emphasizing how Americans are acted upon by hegemony under the guise of individual choice.
Additionally, she explores how documentary form can be expanded through multi-screen installation pieces, such as the recently completed work Anthropocene, inspired by sonic meditation work of Pauline Oliveros. Currently in development, she is in production on a 5-screen, spatial audio, live performance documentary titled Letters to a Heavenly Mother, which weaves together experiences and anecdotes from anonymous oral histories of former Mormon Women.
A large range of her artistic interests is interlaced through an urge to explore the sociological aspects of conformity. Through artistic investigations, her goal is to provide space for audiences to critically engage and empower themselves to examine individual behavior.
