I have suspected for a little while that Michael McGillis is a fulcrum between divergent layers of reality. How else to explain his uncanny ability to peel back the edges of our everyday world, to uncover hidden environments just below the surface? Taken as a whole, McGillis’s work could be seen as a kind of sculptural iteration of magical realism, where undefined or fantastic realities cohabitate within the everyday fixtures that are easily taken for granted. Whether outfitting nature with chance art encounters, like Wake (2006), or constructing immersive gallery installations that synthesize nature in a controlled setting, as with Reckoning a Peripheral Wilderness (2012), McGillis confesses to an “attraction to randomness” that draws him toward found and discarded materials as the foundation for these imagined realities.