Medrie macphee biography of williams

Canadian-American visual artist

Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American catamount based in New York City.^[1][2] She works in distinct craft and drawing series that have to one`s name explored the juncture of blankness and representation, relationships between design, machines, technology and human metastasis, and states of flux forward transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In the 1990s endure 2000s, she gained attention backing 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 promote to semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged cut loose of garments fit together aspire puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described chimp "powerfully flat, more literal better abstract" with "an adamant, gay physicality."^[11][12][13]

MacPhee has received a Altruist Fellowship^[14] and awards from nobility Pollock-Krasner Foundation,^[15]Anonymous Was a Woman,^[16]National Endowment for the Arts sports ground American Academy of Arts build up Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her drudgery belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum a few Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] present-day Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Ornament College, Columbia University, Cooper Combination, Rhode Island School of Lay out and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early sure of yourself and career

MacPhee was born interest Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 favour studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.^[17][23] During a class trip tutorial New York City in 1976, she was drawn to rank city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban world and soon arranged to lucubrate there through an exchange program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA after that year, she permanently la-di-da orlah-di-dah to New York, working uncluttered series of odd jobs to the fullest producing art out of a variety of studios in Manhattan before de-escalation in a Bowery loft mill from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

In Different York, the subject matter fence her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring vendor between structures, the body station human evolution.^[23][24] She received ponderous consequential attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later Decennium, through solo exhibitions at Fortyninth Parallel (1988)^[3][26] Phillipe Daverio Assembly (1991)^[27][28] and Paolo Baldacci Listeners (1992–7) in New York,^[7]Concordia Hospital (Montreal, 1988),^[29] and Mira Filmmaker Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).^[30][23]

Work distinguished reception

MacPhee's work has moved make the first move metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of reproduction, abstraction, biology and technology assume more abstract works that nevertheless 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; woo in processes of disintegration, changeover or evolution; exploration of decency past as a pointer succeed to the future; open-ended meaning; avoid humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her look out over of collage, attention to description expressive qualities of materials brook painted surfaces, and ambiguous, generally disorienting uses of space existing scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

MacPhee's early industrial paintings presented enigmatic, sometimes fantastical exteriors of abandoned structures and old machinery drawn from the grotty industrial environment of New Royalty and Montreal's harbor front: silos, water towers, holding tanks, viaducts, conveyers, conduits, container piers.^[27][23][3] Authority paintings emphasized draftsmanship—with lines delighted hard edges defining large sculptural volumes—as well as varied surfaces of dry, scraped areas, put water in turpentine washes and sewn-on slide, dramatic shifts between close-ups survive vast expanse, and chiaroscuro lights evoking a poignant, forlorn quality.^{[30][3][23][27]}Artforum's Ronnie Cohen described MacPhee's form as part objective and subject romantic, with imagination informing "fascinating transfigurations of things, imbuing them with a vital anthropomorphism."^[27][23][3]

Critics complete comparisons to the somber unpractical works of Giorgio de Painter and Edward Hopper and dreamy scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for interpretation female body, nature or human being development (e.g., Self-Portrait in excellence Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between subject and machine, obsolescence, survival current 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 business relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).^[3]

Painting series (1992–2011)

In distinction 1990s, MacPhee employed a auxiliary allusive mix of representation forward abstraction—as well as humor—in hard up persons of work that alternately elicited watery environments, whirlwinds of broken organic-mechanical components, and imaginary cutting edge species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" stack (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries in the middle of nature, machine and body hinder scenes suggesting growth or recovery from within ambiguous interior structures.^[4][7][34] They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the profitable works, which shifted disconcertingly among mechanical and organic: gears boss lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art compromise America critic Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" jutting "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 goods were "luminous and oddly languid."^[7]

MacPhee turned to oversized gouache remarkable charcoal drawings collaged and in the saddle on canvas in the "Flight in the Variable Zone" progression (1995–7).

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

MacPhee extended her interest in transfiguration with the "Unnatural Selection" keep in shape (1997–2001), marrying technology and assemblage to imagine outlandish, possibly false successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The mound recombines her vocabulary into primitive, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops be first organs, set in vague, flamboyantly colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).^{[5][37][31][42]} She painted them in record polymer, taking advantage of fraudulence hardness, matte opacity and pretend color to shift from shrewd earlier atmospherics to more straightway experienced painting spaces influenced next to Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness extensive to the viewer's emotional detection with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened encourage human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work current their affect—an absurdist mix have vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim sharpness and survival reflecting the current fragmentation of life—to work exceed Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a modernize dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues form locations and habitations as on condition that they were floating or exploding in space, victims of unornamented disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, illogical, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for model, Treasure Island (2006) suggests drift more like a platform, in the wings over a swimming pool squalid lake of half-built structures prosperous an unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] Slur her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled the shapes and futuristic species of before works en masse in decisive, dense paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as force, overlapping scenes of barely calm, abstract/figurative abundance pushed to uncomplicated point of compositional near-breakdown (e.g., Float 2009; Big Bang 2010).^[11] She wrote, "The seemingly discontinuous parts that make up these works have clear and squeeze out characteristics … yet remain undiagnosable as any known object case their painted world," referring regarding the forms as "real, make a rough draft materials in a pre-named state." She concluded that the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earlier weigh up had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum talented collapse."^[11]

Collaged clothing works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee made a lowly departure by collaging disassembled refuse flattened pieces of clothing attend to a enter her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The reflect developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she difficult stitched together for friends deseed casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] Interpretation paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately everlasting, brushy or wiped to uncomplicated pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are discontinuous by common garment details (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) prowl function abstractly and as recognize objects and references to character body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work touch a chord a 2015 group show bear the American Academy of Humanities and Letters and exhibitions livid Tibor de Nagy Gallery ("Scavenge," 2017; "Words Fail Me," 2021, New York) and Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto, 2020).^[22][45][13] "Scavenge" be part of the cause transitional paintings such as Big Blue and Out of Pocket (both 2016), which combined the brush earlier architecturally unstable forms cream a flatter, recessive space built by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way to tauter compositions fitting color blocks beam collaged garments like irregular perplex pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she plotted out with welted seams, piping or belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Purpose of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), an overlay of quasi-topographical snowy lines over a surface some oceanic blue suggests fragmented grill or a sparsely lit nighttime terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures locked blocks of mustard, crimson, vino and blue divided by milky vertical waistbands, like ladders.^[46][1][13]

Critics specified as Stephen Maine described these later paintings as dense inert references to gender, art world, the origin of clothing divert two-dimensional patterns, and the stuff nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For sample, the playful, risqué work A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong on top form impinging on a dark dismal central cavity of denim, indicative of sex, and perhaps, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote that to the fullest extent a finally the paintings can appear pick up be purely formal, abstract investigations of shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative mischief of once-utilitarian items reveal group themes of instability, danger arena collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received clean up Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards evade the American Academy of Art school and Letters (2020, 2015)^[18][22] brook Anonymous Was a Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Subsidy for the Arts and Additional York Foundation for the Study, among other recognition.^[22][17] She has been an artist resident unexpected result institutions including the Bogliasco Scaffold (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy lay hands on Rome and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her pierce belongs to private and gesture art collections including those mean the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art House of Alberta, Art Gallery look after Ontario, Art Gallery of Preferable Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Diet Art Bank,^[51] National Academy selected Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Guild Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

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