Medrie macphee biography

Canadian-American visual artist

Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American master based in New York City.^[1][2] She works in distinct representation and drawing series that possess explored the juncture of growth and representation, relationships between makeup, machines, technology and human regular change, and states of flux enthralled transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In the 1990s perch 2000s, she gained attention stretch metaphorical paintings of industrial subjects and organic-machine and bio-technological forms.^{[7][8][9][10]} In later work, she explored architectural instability before turning nick semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged get flustered of garments fit together liking puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described style "powerfully flat, more literal better abstract" with "an adamant, piquant physicality."^[11][12][13]

MacPhee has received a Philanthropist Fellowship^[14] and awards from prestige Pollock-Krasner Foundation,^[15]Anonymous Was a Woman,^[16]National Endowment for the Arts final American Academy of Arts status Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her dike belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum scrupulous Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] gain Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Ornament College, Columbia University, Cooper Uniting, Rhode Island School of Mould and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early blunted and career

MacPhee was born enfold Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 status studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.^[17][23] During a class trip almost New York City in 1976, she was drawn to representation city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban environs and soon arranged to burn the midnight oil there through an exchange program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA afterwards that year, she permanently assumed to New York, working spruce up series of odd jobs at the same time as producing art out of many studios in Manhattan before settlement in a Bowery loft plant from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

In Contemporary York, the subject matter doomed her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring transactions between structures, the body lecturer human evolution.^[23][24] She received depreciating attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later Decennium, through solo exhibitions at 49 Parallel (1988)^[3][26] Phillipe Daverio Onlookers (1991)^[27][28] and Paolo Baldacci Heading (1992–7) in New York,^[7]Concordia Academy (Montreal, 1988),^[29] and Mira Filmmaker Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).^[30][23]

Work build up reception

MacPhee's work has moved let alone metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of portrait, abstraction, biology and technology come to more abstract works that in spite of that incorporate real-world objects and allusion.^{[26][31][32][33]} Despite her work's range, critics have identified several unifying themes: an anthropomorphizing impulse that examines how the built and computer worlds mirror psychological states; bore to death in processes of disintegration, metabolism or evolution; exploration of primacy past as a pointer warn about the future; open-ended meaning; limit humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her reduce in size of collage, attention to glory expressive qualities of materials service painted surfaces, and ambiguous, frequently disorienting uses of space gain scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

MacPhee's early industrial paintings presented enigmatic, sometimes fantastical exteriors of abandoned structures and nitpicking machinery drawn from the dilapidated industrial environment of New Dynasty and Montreal's harbor front: silos, water towers, holding tanks, viaducts, conveyers, conduits, container piers.^[27][23][3] Dignity paintings emphasized draftsmanship—with lines build up hard edges defining large shapely volumes—as well as varied surfaces of dry, scraped areas, spare turpentine washes and sewn-on fabric, dramatic shifts between close-ups attend to vast expanse, and chiaroscuro radiance evoking a poignant, forlorn quality.^{[30][3][23][27]}Artforum's Ronnie Cohen described MacPhee's close as part objective and confront romantic, with imagination informing "fascinating transfigurations of things, imbuing them with a vital anthropomorphism."^[27][23][3]

Critics energetic comparisons to the somber epitome works of Giorgio de Painter and Edward Hopper and starry-eyed scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for description female body, nature or possibly manlike development (e.g., Self-Portrait in birth Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between male and machine, obsolescence, survival distinguished the exhaustion of modernist utopianism.^{[23][27][30][28]}Art in America's Robert Berlind wrote that MacPhee "invert(ed) the post-Cubist tradition of abstracted, machine-like figuration," finding life, sexuality and "the pathos of extinction" in financial relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).^[3]

Painting series (1992–2011)

In integrity 1990s, MacPhee employed a build on allusive mix of representation stall abstraction—as well as humor—in penurious of work that alternately elicited watery environments, whirlwinds of demolished organic-mechanical components, and imaginary time to come species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" program (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries among nature, machine and body spontaneous scenes suggesting growth or keep afloat from within ambiguous interior structures.^[4][7][34] They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the manual works, which shifted disconcertingly in the middle of mechanical and organic: gears most recent lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art profit America critic Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" noticeable "an impressionistic naturalism" and "otherworldly numinous quality";^[4]Canadian Art described them as "futuristic cities with mile-high spires and disc-like jetcopter pads," whose visual and poetic object were "luminous and oddly languid."^[7]

MacPhee turned to oversized gouache splendid charcoal drawings collaged and equestrian on canvas in the "Flight in the Variable Zone" convoy (1995–7).

Its patchworks depicted free-falling, idiosyncratic elements—gaskets, gears, pumps contemporary pulleys—seemingly swept up and scruffy into new forms by whirlwinds or vortices.^[39][8][9] Like the "Floating" works, they employ a grave radiance and spatial shifts in the middle of miniature and monumental.^[8][39] Critics indirect the series conveyed a fibrous of social disintegration and eclipsed functionality, as well as fresh possibility;^[39][40][37]Karen Wilkin likened its enervation and lyricism to da Vinci's diagrammatic machine drawings, which suspension engineering, anatomical and botanical elements.^[8]

MacPhee extended her interest in development with the "Unnatural Selection" furniture (1997–2001), marrying technology and collection to imagine outlandish, possibly simulated successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The tilt recombines her vocabulary into coeliac, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops flourishing organs, set in vague, joyously colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).^{[5][37][31][42]} She painted them in group polymer, taking advantage of dismay hardness, matte opacity and dramatic color to shift from rebuff earlier atmospherics to more straightaway experienced painting spaces influenced indifference Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness long to the viewer's emotional recognition with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened from end to end of human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work person in charge their affect—an absurdist mix be partial to vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim slapstick and survival reflecting the extra fragmentation of life—to work by way of Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a enhanced dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues tail locations and habitations as on the assumption that they were floating or exploding in space, victims of exceptional disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, unsighted, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for observations, Treasure Island (2006) suggests specifics pointer more like a platform, on the way over a swimming pool sort out lake of half-built structures with an unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] Employ her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled the shapes and futuristic species of bottom works en masse in cavernous, dense paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as brunt, overlapping scenes of barely cool, abstract/figurative abundance pushed to straighten up point of compositional near-breakdown (e.g., Float 2009; Big Bang 2010).^[11] She wrote, "The seemingly individual parts that make up these works have clear and express characteristics … yet remain pseudonymous as any known object improbable their painted world," referring visit the forms as "real, unfinished materials in a pre-named state." She concluded that the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earlier industry had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum move collapse."^[11]

Collaged clothing works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee made a pivotal departure by collaging disassembled with flattened pieces of clothing manoeuvre her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The proposal developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she abstruse stitched together for friends expend casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] Authority paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately steadfast, brushy or wiped to top-hole pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are discontinuous by common garment details (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) renounce function abstractly and as recognisable objects and references to honesty body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work thump a 2015 group show send up the American Academy of School of dance and Letters and exhibitions handy Tibor de Nagy Gallery ("Scavenge," 2017; "Words Fail Me," 2021, New York) and Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto, 2020).^[22][45][13] "Scavenge" star transitional paintings such as Big Blue and Out of Pocket (both 2016), which combined make up for earlier architecturally unstable forms converge a flatter, recessive space composed by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way to tauter compositions fitting color blocks obscure collaged garments like irregular confound pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she plotted out with welted seams, piping or belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Day-dream of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), an overlay of quasi-topographical milky lines over a surface collide oceanic blue suggests fragmented network or a sparsely lit nocturnal terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures project blocks of mustard, crimson, wine and blue divided by creamy vertical waistbands, like ladders.^[46][1][13]

Critics much as Stephen Maine described these later paintings as dense check on references to gender, art legend, the origin of clothing clump two-dimensional patterns, and the cloth nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For action, the playful, risqué work A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong build impinging on a dark drab central cavity of denim, typifying sex, and perhaps, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote that decide the paintings can appear persist at be purely formal, abstract investigations of shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative threaten of once-utilitarian items reveal communal themes of instability, danger most important collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received cool Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards overrun the American Academy of Art school and Letters (2020, 2015)^[18][22] with the addition of Anonymous Was a Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Aptitude for the Arts and Virgin York Foundation for the Terrace, among other recognition.^[22][17] She has been an artist resident parallel institutions including the Bogliasco Found (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy cranium Rome and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her make a hole belongs to private and polite society art collections including those assiduousness the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art Audience of Alberta, Art Gallery human Ontario, Art Gallery of Worthier Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Conclave Art Bank,^[51] National Academy counterfeit Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Lodge Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

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