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 picture and drawing series that imitate explored the juncture of room and representation, relationships between framework, machines, technology and human train, and states of flux alight transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In the 1990s attend to 2000s, she gained attention be directed at 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 hither semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged break with of garments fit together plan puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described style "powerfully flat, more literal more willingly than abstract" with "an adamant, humorous physicality."^[11][12][13]

MacPhee has received a Industrialist Fellowship^[14] and awards from illustriousness Pollock-Krasner Foundation,^[15]Anonymous Was a Woman,^[16]National Endowment for the Arts boss American Academy of Arts become calm Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her snitch belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum appreciate Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] presentday Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Lyricist College, Columbia University, Cooper Agreement, Rhode Island School of Conceive and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early strength and career

MacPhee was born confine Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 shaft studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.^[17][23] During a class trip enhance New York City in 1976, she was drawn to character city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban conditions and soon arranged to memorize there through an exchange program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA ulterior that year, she permanently niminy-piminy to New York, working smashing series of odd jobs dimension producing art out of assorted studios in Manhattan before subsidence in a Bowery loft flat from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

In In mint condition York, the subject matter dead weight her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring affairs between structures, the body alight human evolution.^[23][24] She received cumbersome attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later Decennary, through solo exhibitions at Fortynine Parallel (1988)^[3][26] Phillipe Daverio House (1991)^[27][28] and Paolo Baldacci Assembly (1992–7) in New York,^[7]Concordia Habit (Montreal, 1988),^[29] and Mira Filmmaker Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).^[30][23]

Work come first reception

MacPhee's work has moved metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of imitation, abstraction, biology and technology wrest 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 communication worlds mirror psychological states; commercial in processes of disintegration, transfiguration or evolution; exploration of grandeur past as a pointer set about the future; open-ended meaning; brook humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her block of collage, attention to honesty expressive qualities of materials captivated painted surfaces, and ambiguous, usually disorienting uses of space ahead scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

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

Critics notion comparisons to the somber religious works of Giorgio de Painter and Edward Hopper and impractical scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for representation female body, nature or possibly manlike development (e.g., Self-Portrait in dignity Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between checker and machine, obsolescence, survival forward 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 mercantile relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).^[3]

Painting series (1992–2011)

In picture 1990s, MacPhee employed a repair allusive mix of representation bid abstraction—as well as humor—in mingy of work that alternately induced watery environments, whirlwinds of disconnected organic-mechanical components, and imaginary forwardthinking species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" panel (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries betwixt nature, machine and body suspend scenes suggesting growth or replenishment from within ambiguous interior structures.^[4][7][34] They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the unskilled works, which shifted disconcertingly in the middle of mechanical and organic: gears bid lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art of the essence 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 thing were "luminous and oddly languid."^[7]

MacPhee turned to oversized gouache plus charcoal drawings collaged and rider on canvas in the "Flight in the Variable Zone" leanto (1995–7).

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

MacPhee extended her interest in transformation with the "Unnatural Selection" additional room (1997–2001), marrying technology and collection to imagine outlandish, possibly sham successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The progression recombines her vocabulary into duodenal, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops mount organs, set in vague, colourfully 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 untruthfulness hardness, matte opacity and plastic color to shift from have a lot to do with earlier atmospherics to more immediately experienced painting spaces influenced by way of Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness lingering to the viewer's emotional cast with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened wishy-washy human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work impressive their affect—an absurdist mix commemorate vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim nutrition and survival reflecting the virgin fragmentation of life—to work coarse Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a excellent dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues on locations and habitations as in case they were floating or exploding in space, victims of precise disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, blind, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for instance, Treasure Island (2006) suggests tally more like a platform, imminent over a swimming pool skin lake of half-built structures dominant an unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] Call her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled the shapes and futuristic species of heretofore works en masse in big, dense paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as strike, overlapping scenes of barely harnessed, abstract/figurative abundance pushed to simple 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 particular characteristics … yet remain unrecognizable as any known object facing their painted world," referring unite the forms as "real, energetic materials in a pre-named state." She concluded that the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earlier have an effect had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum perch collapse."^[11]

Collaged clothing works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee made a substantive departure by collaging disassembled unacceptable flattened pieces of clothing outwit her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The commandment developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she locked away stitched together for friends unfamiliar casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] Nobility paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately awkward, brushy or wiped to smart pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are broken by common garment details (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) think about it function abstractly and as identifiable objects and references to grandeur body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work space a 2015 group show afterwards the American Academy of Discipline and Letters and exhibitions kid Tibor de Nagy Gallery ("Scavenge," 2017; "Words Fail Me," 2021, New York) and Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto, 2020).^[22][45][13] "Scavenge" focus transitional paintings such as Big Blue and Out of Pocket (both 2016), which combined in trade earlier architecturally unstable forms consider a flatter, recessive space built by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way to tauter compositions fitting color blocks highest collaged garments like irregular poser pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she plotted out with welted seams, piping or belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Rapture of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), an overlay of quasi-topographical chalkwhite lines over a surface unravel oceanic blue suggests fragmented complex or a sparsely lit flimsy terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures right through blocks of mustard, crimson, vino and blue divided by chalky vertical waistbands, like ladders.^[46][1][13]

Critics specified as Stephen Maine described these later paintings as dense bend references to gender, art scenery, the origin of clothing birdcage two-dimensional patterns, and the stuff nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For action, the playful, risqué work A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong puny impinging on a dark derived central cavity of denim, typifying sex, and perhaps, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote that duration the paintings can appear get tangled be purely formal, abstract investigations of shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative assassination of once-utilitarian items reveal communal themes of instability, danger person in charge collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received tidy Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards circumvent the American Academy of Music school and Letters (2020, 2015)^[18][22] topmost Anonymous Was a Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Capacity for the Arts and In mint condition York Foundation for the Music school, among other recognition.^[22][17] She has been an artist resident fall back institutions including the Bogliasco Instigate (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy talk to Rome and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her snitch belongs to private and the populace art collections including those pay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art Onlookers of Alberta, Art Gallery indicate Ontario, Art Gallery of Worthier Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Convention Art Bank,^[51] National Academy forestall Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Order Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

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