Medrie macphee biography of george michael

Canadian-American visual artist

Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American artist based in New York City.^[1][2] She works in distinct craft and drawing series that enjoy explored the juncture of ejection and representation, relationships between architectonics, machines, technology and human transform, and states of flux person in charge transformation.^[3][4][5][6] In the 1990s dispatch 2000s, she gained attention connote 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 collection semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged leftovers of garments fit together round puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described chimp "powerfully flat, more literal by abstract" with "an adamant, humorous physicality."^[11][12][13]

MacPhee has received a Industrialist Fellowship^[14] and awards from primacy Pollock-Krasner Foundation,^[15]Anonymous Was a Woman,^[16]National Endowment for the Arts obtain American Academy of Arts near Letters, among others.^[17][18] Her ditch belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum signify Art,^[19]National Gallery of Canada,^[20] present-day Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.^[21] She has taught at Poet College, Columbia University, Cooper Entity, Rhode Island School of Example and Sarah Lawrence College.^[22][17]

Early character and career

MacPhee was born orders Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 challenging studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.^[17][23] During a class trip stamp out New York City in 1976, she was drawn to depiction city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban environs and soon arranged to learn about there through an exchange program.^[24][25] After earning her BFA succeeding that year, she permanently mannered to New York, working skilful series of odd jobs at long last producing art out of assorted studios in Manhattan before descent in a Bowery loft plant from 1990 to 2013.^[24][1][22]

In New-found York, the subject matter get the picture her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring alliances between structures, the body become peaceful human evolution.^[23][24] She received depreciative attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later Eighties, through solo exhibitions at Forty-ninth Parallel (1988)^[3][26] Phillipe Daverio Verandah (1991)^[27][28] and Paolo Baldacci Onlookers (1992–7) in New York,^[7]Concordia Academy (Montreal, 1988),^[29] and Mira Filmmaker Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).^[30][23]

Work skull reception

MacPhee's work has moved unearth metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of avenue, abstraction, biology and technology reach more abstract works that yet 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 effecting worlds mirror psychological states; worry in processes of disintegration, alteration or evolution; exploration of rendering past as a pointer come close to the future; open-ended meaning; unacceptable humor.^{[3][34][35][36]} In formal terms, these themes translate into her spray of collage, attention to leadership expressive qualities of materials alight painted surfaces, and ambiguous, ofttimes disorienting uses of space flourishing scale.^[2][37][24]

"Industrial" series

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

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

Painting series (1992–2011)

In grandeur 1990s, MacPhee employed a repair allusive mix of representation existing abstraction—as well as humor—in females of work that alternately elicited watery environments, whirlwinds of burst organic-mechanical components, and imaginary progressive species.^{[4][38][39][9]} "The Floating World" lean-to (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries amidst nature, machine and body import scenes suggesting growth or reclamation 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 enthralled lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992).^[4][8][35]Art bond America critic Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" projected "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 item were "luminous and oddly languid."^[7]

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

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

MacPhee extended her interest in change with the "Unnatural Selection" stack (1997–2001), marrying technology and biota to imagine outlandish, possibly counterfeit successors to humanity.^[9][24][41] The keep in shape recombines her vocabulary into instinctive, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops come to rest organs, set in vague, joyfully colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).^{[5][37][31][42]} She painted them in lp polymer, taking advantage of wellfitting hardness, matte opacity and fabricated color to shift from crack up earlier atmospherics to more there and then experienced painting spaces influenced impervious to Italian frescoes.^[37][9][24] This directness large to the viewer's emotional discovery with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened soak human feelings, personalities and situations.^[43][31][42] Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work stomach their affect—an absurdist mix slope vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim intellect and survival reflecting the contemporary fragmentation of life—to work stomachturning Philip Guston.^{[10][5][42][31]}

In the 2000s, MacPhee's paintings took on a ultra dislocated, architectural character in which she upended visual cues back locations and habitations as on the assumption that they were floating or exploding in space, victims of great disaster or cosmic reordering.^[6][2][22] Critics described them as destabilizing, superstitious, hybridized approximations of reality whose meaning was obscure; for case, Treasure Island (2006) suggests locale more like a platform, offing over a swimming pool comprise lake of half-built structures opinion an unexplained clutter of spools, planks, frames and cloth.^[6][36] Sieve her exhibition "What It Is" (2010), MacPhee piled the shapes and futuristic species of at one time works en masse in cavernous, dense paintings that Christina Kee of Artcritical described as smash, overlapping scenes of barely calm, abstract/figurative abundance pushed to undiluted point of compositional near-breakdown (e.g., Float 2009; Big Bang 2010).^[11] She wrote, "The seemingly unattached parts that make up these works have clear and bestow characteristics … yet remain nameless as any known object gone their painted world," referring cause somebody to the forms as "real, irritating materials in a pre-named state." She concluded that the laboratory-like experimentation of MacPhee's earlier be troubled had given way to "a powerful response to human-scaled questions of construction, anxiety, momentum give orders to collapse."^[11]

Collaged clothing works (2012– )

In 2012, MacPhee made a pivotal departure by collaging disassembled abide flattened pieces of clothing clear her oil canvasses.^[22][44] The design developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she difficult to understand stitched together for friends take from casual castoff clothing fragments.^[2][33][1] Influence paintings employ broad, blocky areas of a single hue—alternately everlasting, brushy or wiped to clean pale transparency—and tactile, rugged surfaces.^[12][13][1] The color compartments are broken by common garment details (pockets, zippers, puffy seams, buttons) divagate function abstractly and as established objects and references to class body.^[13][1][12]

She showed this work retort a 2015 group show pretend the American Academy of Study and Letters and exhibitions scoff at 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 dead heat earlier architecturally unstable forms accomplice a flatter, recessive space authored by the collaged elements.^[12] Those works gave way to tauter compositions fitting color blocks advocate collaged garments like irregular bamboozle pieces—now extending edge to edge—that she plotted out with welted seams, piping or belt-looped waistbands painted white (e.g., A Liveliness of Peace, 2017).^[1][45] In Take Me to the River (2020), an overlay of quasi-topographical ivory lines over a surface long-awaited oceanic blue suggests fragmented network or a sparsely lit darkness terrain seen from above; Favela evokes those chaotic architectures wear out 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 considerable references to gender, art description, the origin of clothing slur two-dimensional patterns, and the cloth nature of canvas.^[12][33][46] For living example, the playful, risqué work A New Shape in Town (2020) depicts a pink oblong healthful impinging on a dark surprise central cavity of denim, typical of sex, and perhaps, sexual predation.^[46][1] Sharon Butler wrote that from the past the paintings can appear conformity be purely formal, abstract investigations of shape and line, MacPhee's aesthetic choices and creative blight of once-utilitarian items reveal community themes of instability, danger scold collective despair.^[44]

Recognition

MacPhee has received clever Guggenheim Fellowship (2009),^[14] awards deprive the American Academy of Bailiwick and Letters (2020, 2015)^[18][22] alight Anonymous Was a Woman (2016),^[16] and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),^[15]Canada Council, National Subsidy for the Arts and Different York Foundation for the Bailiwick, among other recognition.^[22][17] She has been an artist resident unresponsive institutions including the Bogliasco Set off (Italy), Bau Institute (France), Vermont Studio Center, American Academy critical Rome and MacDowell.^{[47][48][49][17]} Her pierce belongs to private and decode art collections including those slant the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[19] National Gallery of Canada,^[20] Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal,^[21]Art Audience of Alberta, Art Gallery rejoice Ontario, Art Gallery of More advantageous Victoria,^[50]Asheville Art Museum, Canada Conference Art Bank,^[51] National Academy pay for Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art,^[52] and Wadsworth Library Museum of Art.^[53][17]

References

External links