Dwight Gooden, a boombox and a meteorite may not seem to possess inherent relationships, but to artist Michael Jones McKean, there’s more of a connection there than you might think.

McKean, an internationally exhibiting artist and Virginia Commonwealth University assistant professor in its Department of Sculpture and Extended Media, received a Guggenheim fellowship in April.

His work involves installations, photographs and music, in much the same way collages are made of images or cutouts. McKean either constructs or creates objects, or he incorporates them into tableaux.

“Sometimes we forget that objects have meaning outside of their function and utility — they have poetic meaning as well,” McKean explains. “Objects have the ability to report back to us — to tell us delicate things about ourselves.”

A colleague of McKean’s described the artist’s works as “the elusive epic.” They are, as another has observed, “places-out-of-place within time-out-of-time.” McKean’s art gives substance and heft to the unusual, even unclassifiable.

His past topics have included free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, whose 1970 drowning in the East River was presumed a suicide, and Donald Crowhurst, the seafaring adventurer whose 1969 effort to compete in a solo circumnavigation race ended in his disappearance.

Logbooks on Crowhurst’s trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron, revealed that he’d apparently driven himself mad. McKean bought the beached boat in 2007, made large multiprint images and included fragments of the boat in later sculptures.

He created an actual rainbow over his Richmond studio, and made images of that, too, no Photoshop required.

McKean declined to say how much his prize was worth, but the average amount of Guggenheim grants in the 2008 United States and Canada competition was $43,200. The purpose is to give artists the freedom to pursue their projects, from six months to a year.

With the time allowed by the fellowship, McKean hopes to develop projects in Berlin, Seattle and Tel Aviv, Israel. He’ll also work on completing an eight-year effort to manifest a large-scale prismatic rainbow — using a five-story building, water and sunlight — that will first be shown at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb. This fall, he’ll be working both on a long-form poem and sculptures while in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program of New York City.

To see examples of his work, visit michaeljonesmckean.com.