TRICKSTER UTOPIA PAINTINGS 2020-2021
"SPILYAY’S CHALLENGE IS ADDRESSED TO BOTH NON-INDIAN AND INDIAN
TO LEARN ABOUT THE ART OF LIFE AND DEATH.
THE CHALLENGE OF SPILYAY IS ALL AROUND US."
"McPhee’s five large paintings continue in, and expand on, her tradition of highly controlled and elegant mark-making. They speak a gestural language rich with references to the natural world and to physical and emotional landscape. Her dense, cinematic and palimpsestic works invite you in through their scrim via nuanced points of entry: a dart of intense orange, a window of Naples yellow. The works assert themselves both as images and as monoliths, jutting out from the wall with hefty edges (which are themselves fully considered, revealing glimpses of the underpainting). Are they space or surface, or both? Entire theses are contained within their edges." -- Madeleine Ignon, LUM Art, 2021
A global pandemic, environmental catastrophes, mass migration, Black Lives Matter and human rights protests have all informed McPhee’s gloriously complex paintings. Pigment pops and ecologies emerge from shattered and fragmented forms, oscillating between clustering nests and murmurations, a call and response between man and nature, fight or flight.
McPhee’s urgent paintings insist we have reached a tipping point, a cascading violent crescendo. Each painting vibrates and resonates, containing a choreographed cacophony, punctured by cusps and hollows that pause and hold the breath, sheltering the innocent, the broken, the wounded, the weary. McPhee suggests that en masse we might rebuke the choke, evade erosion. Fleshy pinks, luscious limes, brick reds, tease and test. Pockets of hope, of redress, yield new ways of being. - CH
Trickster Utopia paintings were shown with ceramics by Toshiaki Nora at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, (background image) and at Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, in 2021 (see below).
Photos in slide show : Solien and McPhee, Swerve/Collide installation at Left Field, photos by Elliot Johnson