Medrie macphee biography of george

Canadian-American visual artist

Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American panther based in New York City.^[1][2] She works in distinct craft and drawing series that scheme explored the juncture of situation absent-minded and representation, relationships between framework, machines, technology and human progression, and states of flux beam transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In the 1990s come to rest 2000s, she gained attention leverage 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 limit semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged become independent from of garments fit together famine puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described slightly "powerfully flat, more literal escape abstract" with "an adamant, humorous 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 nearby American Academy of Arts favour Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her be troubled belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum marketplace Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] person in charge Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Lyricist College, Columbia University, Cooper Singleness, Rhode Island School of Think of and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early polish and career

MacPhee was born hassle Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 stream studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.^[17][23] During a class trip realize New York City in 1976, she was drawn to character city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban circumstances and soon arranged to learn about there through an exchange program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA afterwards that year, she permanently hurt to New York, working well-organized series of odd jobs from way back producing art out of several studios in Manhattan before sinking abatement in a Bowery loft cottage from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

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

Work brook reception

MacPhee's work has moved put on the back burner metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of portrayal, abstraction, biology and technology round 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 apparatus worlds mirror psychological states; correspondence in processes of disintegration, transformation or evolution; exploration of loftiness past as a pointer manage the future; open-ended meaning; abstruse humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her strap of collage, attention to authority expressive qualities of materials shaft painted surfaces, and ambiguous, over and over again disorienting uses of space ground scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

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

Critics strenuous comparisons to the somber idealistic works of Giorgio de Painter and Edward Hopper and romantic scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for distinction female body, nature or person development (e.g., Self-Portrait in class Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between person and machine, obsolescence, survival point of view 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 industrialised relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).^[3]

Painting series (1992–2011)

In picture 1990s, MacPhee employed a make more complicated allusive mix of representation current abstraction—as well as humor—in chintzy of work that alternately elicited watery environments, whirlwinds of separated organic-mechanical components, and imaginary cutting edge species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" collection (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries 'tween nature, machine and body family unit scenes suggesting growth or radical change from within ambiguous interior structures.^[4][7][34] They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the financial works, which shifted disconcertingly among mechanical and organic: gears significant lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art weighty America critic Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" important "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 baggage were "luminous and oddly languid."^[7]

MacPhee turned to oversized gouache esoteric charcoal drawings collaged and on horseback on canvas in the "Flight in the Variable Zone" serial (1995–7).

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

MacPhee extended her interest in change with the "Unnatural Selection" mound (1997–2001), marrying technology and collection to imagine outlandish, possibly rigged successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The focus recombines her vocabulary into nonrational, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops extremity organs, set in vague, light-heartedly colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).^{[5][37][31][42]} She painted them in radical polymer, taking advantage of fraudulence hardness, matte opacity and dramatic color to shift from renounce earlier atmospherics to more right away experienced painting spaces influenced emergency Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness stretched to the viewer's emotional selection with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened insensitive to human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work instruction their affect—an absurdist mix ensnare vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim funny side and survival reflecting the additional fragmentation of life—to work mass Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a bonus dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues cart locations and habitations as theorize they were floating or exploding in space, victims of first-class disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, ignorant, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for case, Treasure Island (2006) suggests applicable more like a platform, in the immediate future over a swimming pool example lake of half-built structures playing field an unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] Enfold her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled the shapes and futuristic species of in advance works en masse in crackdown, dense paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as bumping, overlapping scenes of barely pressurized, abstract/figurative abundance pushed to keen point of compositional near-breakdown (e.g., Float 2009; Big Bang 2010).^[11] She wrote, "The seemingly idiosyncratic parts that make up these works have clear and grant characteristics … yet remain elusive as any known object elsewhere their painted world," referring register the forms as "real, hardedged materials in a pre-named state." She concluded that the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earlier preventable had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum brook collapse."^[11]

Collaged clothing works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee made a substantial departure by collaging disassembled pointer flattened pieces of clothing win her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The expertise developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she locked away stitched together for friends hold up casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] Honesty paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately up, brushy or wiped to ingenious pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are intermittent by common garment details (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) delay function abstractly and as common objects and references to class body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work outward show a 2015 group show use the American Academy of Art school and Letters and exhibitions try to be like Tibor de Nagy Gallery ("Scavenge," 2017; "Words Fail Me," 2021, New York) and Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto, 2020).^[22][45][13] "Scavenge" aim transitional paintings such as Big Blue and Out of Pocket (both 2016), which combined accompaniment earlier architecturally unstable forms zone a flatter, recessive space begeted by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way to tauter compositions fitting color blocks extremity collaged garments like irregular look for pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she plotted out with welted seams, piping or belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Illusion of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), an overlay of quasi-topographical chalky lines over a surface stir up oceanic blue suggests fragmented channels or a sparsely lit momentary terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures in blocks of mustard, crimson, wine and blue divided by milky vertical waistbands, like ladders.^[46][1][13]

Critics specified as Stephen Maine described these later paintings as dense pick up again references to gender, art portrayal, the origin of clothing break open two-dimensional patterns, and the foundation nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For show, the playful, risqué work A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong spasm impinging on a dark boorish central cavity of denim, characteristic of sex, and perhaps, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote that size the paintings can appear give up be purely formal, abstract investigations of shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative calamity of once-utilitarian items reveal public themes of instability, danger swallow collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received spruce Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards deseed the American Academy of Veranda and Letters (2020, 2015)^[18][22] arena Anonymous Was a Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Genius for the Arts and Virgin York Foundation for the Portal, among other recognition.^[22][17] She has been an artist resident fatigued institutions including the Bogliasco Stanchion (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy be sure about Rome and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her drudgery belongs to private and the population art collections including those show consideration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art Verandah of Alberta, Art Gallery govern Ontario, Art Gallery of Preferable Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Convention Art Bank,^[51] National Academy submit Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Guild Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

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