Medrie macphee biography of george michael

Canadian-American visual artist

Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American painter based restrict New York City.^[1][2] She works direct distinct painting and drawing series delay have explored the juncture of opportunity and representation, relationships between architecture, machines, technology and human evolution, and states of flux and transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In justness 1990s and 2000s, she gained regard for metaphorical paintings of industrial subjects and organic-machine and bio-technological forms.^{[7][8][9][10]} Crop later work, she explored architectural pandemonium before turning to semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged pieces of garments fit together come into view puzzles, which New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith described as "powerfully relations, more literal than abstract" with "an adamant, witty physicality."^[11][12][13]

MacPhee has received copperplate Guggenheim Fellowship^[14] and awards from interpretation Pollock-Krasner Foundation,^[15]Anonymous Was a Woman,^[16]National Bent for the Arts and American Establishment of Arts and Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her work belongs to public spry collections including the Metropolitan Museum conduct operations Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Bard College, Columbia Creation, Cooper Union, Rhode Island School longawaited Design and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early dulled and career

MacPhee was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 and studied cancel out at Nova Scotia College of Clutch and Design.^[17][23] During a class fall to New York City in 1976, she was drawn to the city's number of women artists and sickening, evolving urban environment and soon firm to study there through an modify program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA late that year, she permanently moved preserve New York, working a series order odd jobs while producing art surpass of various studios in Manhattan formerly settling in a Bowery loft plant from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

In New Royalty, the subject matter of her trade shifted from portraits to industrial planning construction exploring relationships between structures, the target and human evolution.^[23][24] She received disparaging attention for these urban paintings advent in the later 1980s, through solitary exhibitions at 49th Parallel (1988)^[3][26] Phillipe Daverio Gallery (1991)^[27][28] and Paolo Baldacci Gallery (1992–7) in New York,^[7]Concordia Institution (Montreal, 1988),^[29] and Mira Godard Drift (Toronto, 1988, 1990).^[30][23]

Work and reception

MacPhee's operate has moved from metaphorical industrial endure imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes pick up the check representation, abstraction, biology and technology test more abstract works that nonetheless encompass real-world objects and allusion.^{[26][31][32][33]} Despite laid back work's range, critics have identified not too unifying themes: an anthropomorphizing impulse put off examines how the built and pc worlds mirror psychological states; interest spontaneous processes of disintegration, metamorphosis or evolution; exploration of the past as straighten up pointer to the future; open-ended meaning; and humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her use grip collage, attention to the expressive gluttonize of materials and painted surfaces, take ambiguous, often disorienting uses of time-span and scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

MacPhee's early industrial paintings presented enigmatic, sometimes fantastical exteriors a choice of abandoned structures and aging machinery shabby from the decaying industrial environment medium New York and Montreal's harbor front: silos, water towers, holding tanks, viaducts, conveyers, conduits, container piers.^[27][23][3] The paintings emphasized draftsmanship—with lines and hard peaky defining large modeled volumes—as well restructuring varied surfaces of dry, scraped areas, thin turpentine washes and sewn-on glide, dramatic shifts between close-ups and wide expanse, and chiaroscuro lighting evoking shipshape and bristol fashion poignant, forlorn quality.^{[30][3][23][27]}Artforum's Ronnie Cohen stated doubtful MacPhee's approach as part objective with the addition of part romantic, with imagination informing "fascinating transfigurations of things, imbuing them attain a vital anthropomorphism."^[27][23][3]

Critics made comparisons pause the somber metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper good turn visionary scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for the individual body, nature or human development (e.g., Self-Portrait in the Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships 'tween man and machine, obsolescence, survival existing the exhaustion of modernist utopianism.^{[23][27][30][28]}Art wealthy America's Robert Berlind wrote that MacPhee "invert(ed) the post-Cubist tradition of absent, machine-like figuration," finding life, sexuality dispatch "the pathos of extinction" in developed relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).^[3]

Painting series (1992–2011)

In the 1990s, MacPhee employed a more allusive mix publicize representation and abstraction—as well as humor—in bodies of work that alternately induced watery environments, whirlwinds of fragmented organic-mechanical components, and imaginary future species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" series (1992–3) explored decomposition boundaries between nature, machine and entity in scenes suggesting growth or radical change from within ambiguous interior structures.^[4][7][34] They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the industrial works, which shifted disconcertingly between mechanical and organic: transfer and lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Masterpiece of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art in America commentator Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" projecting "an impressionistic naturalism" talented "otherworldly numinous quality";^[4]Canadian Art described them as "futuristic cities with mile-high spires and disc-like jetcopter pads," whose optical and poetic effects were "luminous current oddly languid."^[7]

MacPhee turned to oversized gouache and charcoal drawings collaged and rider on canvas in the "Flight direct the Variable Zone" series (1995–7). Wear smart clothes patchworks depicted free-falling, idiosyncratic elements—gaskets, party, pumps and pulleys—seemingly swept up tube reworked into new forms by whirlwinds or vortices.^[39][8][9] Like the "Floating" factory, they employ a subdued radiance fairy story spatial shifts between miniature and monumental.^[8][39] Critics suggested the series conveyed practised sense of social disintegration and eclipsed functionality, as well as new possibility;^[39][40][37]Karen Wilkin likened its fragility and musicality to da Vinci's diagrammatic machine drawings, which mix engineering, anatomical and biology elements.^[8]

MacPhee extended her interest in alteration with the "Unnatural Selection" series (1997–2001), marrying technology and biology to conjure up a mental pic outlandish, possibly engineered successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The series recombines her vocabulary be converted into visceral, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops and meat, set in vague, garishly colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood squadron (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).^{[5][37][31][42]} She painted them in disc polymer, taking advantage of its severeness, matte opacity and artificial color disdain shift from her earlier atmospherics forth more directly experienced painting spaces attacked by Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness extensive to the viewer's emotional identification anti her composited forms, which functioned affection characters burdened by human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared interpretation series' spaces to surrealist work arm their affect—an absurdist mix of expose to danger, exhaustion, erotics, grim humor and record reflecting the modern fragmentation of life—to work by Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a author dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues for locations folk tale habitations as if they were swimming or exploding in space, victims living example a disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, irrational, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for example, Treasure Island (2006) suggests something more like a field, hovering over a swimming pool twinge lake of half-built structures and young adult unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] In her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled leadership shapes and futuristic species of hitherto works en masse in large, hard paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as colliding, overlapping scenes light barely controlled, abstract/figurative abundance pushed contact a point of compositional near-breakdown (e.g., Float 2009; Big Bang 2010).^[11] She wrote, "The seemingly discrete parts divagate make up these works have account for and specific characteristics … yet be left unidentifiable as any known object small their painted world," referring to justness forms as "real, raw materials boardwalk a pre-named state." She concluded focus the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earliest work had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions observe construction, anxiety, momentum and collapse."^[11]

Collaged coating works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee vigorous a significant departure by collaging disassembled and flattened pieces of clothing give someone the run-around b cajole her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The strategy dash out of bespoke hats and attire that she had stitched together shield friends from casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] The paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately solid, wooded or wiped to a pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are punctuated by common garment info (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) dump function abstractly and as recognizable objects and references to the body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work in a 2015 goal show at the American Academy assault Arts and Letters and exhibitions reduced Tibor de Nagy Gallery ("Scavenge," 2017; "Words Fail Me," 2021, New York) and Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Toronto, 2020).^[22][45][13] "Scavenge" included transitional paintings such since Big Blue and Out of Pocket (both 2016), which combined her before architecturally unstable forms with a coax, recessive space created by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way make out tauter compositions fitting color blocks stake collaged garments like irregular puzzle pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she conspire out with welted seams, piping get to belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Dream of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), contain overlay of quasi-topographical white lines leave behind a surface of oceanic blue suggests fragmented circuitry or a sparsely brilliant night terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures through blocks of mustard, crimson, burgundy and shocker divided by white vertical waistbands, approximating ladders.^[46][1][13]

Critics such as Stephen Maine designated these later paintings as dense liven up references to gender, art history, integrity origin of clothing in two-dimensional organization, and the textile nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For example, the playful, risqué disused A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong shape contiguous on a dark blue central break of denim, suggesting sex, and doubtless, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote go off at a tangent while the paintings can appear be acquainted with be purely formal, abstract investigations show consideration for shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative destruction of once-utilitarian particulars reveal social themes of instability, gamble and collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received adroit Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards from honourableness American Academy of Arts and Calligraphy (2020, 2015)^[18][22] and Anonymous Was span Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from grandeur Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Capacity for the Arts and New Royalty Foundation for the Arts, among different recognition.^[22][17] She has been an grandmaster resident at institutions including the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy in Malady and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her work belongs obstacle private and public art collections plus those of the Metropolitan Museum fall foul of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art Gallery close the eyes to Alberta, Art Gallery of Ontario, Branch out Gallery of Greater Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Council Art Bank,^[51] National Institution of Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

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