Through drawing as a transdisciplinary practice, Christina McPhee grounds her work in embodied knowledge and the sense of the open work. Across painting and drawing, as well as animated single and multichannel video, common ground is generated through serrated thresholds, linear pathways and iterative fields of nuanced color. Tension and resonance between spirituality and sense of place, handwriting and drawing, indeterminacy and the finite are dynamic folds in her work. Collage and transcription of literary texts develop a syntax around subversive beauty, strangeness, and joy in the face of struggle. Trauma is affiliated to geological phenomena in a visual bundle she calls 'seismic memory,' or the notion of a feedback loop between telluric processes and human life. Her work is motivated by Fluxus historically, and participates in research on landscape through an anti-colonial understanding and network.
Solo museum exhibitions include KinoSaito Art Center, upstate New York; American University Museum / Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; among others. Her work has recently been exhibited in group exhibitions with Art/Science Lab, University of California-Los Angeles as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide; Wonzimer, Bridge Projects, and Beta Epochs, all in Los Angeles; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, Pullman; Great Plains Art Museum at University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín; Documenta 12, Kassel; Bucharest Biennial 3, Bucharest; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; among others. McPhee is the recipient of awards and grants including for Carbon Song Cycle (Pamela Z/Christina McPhee) from the National Endowment for the Arts via the Cinematic Arts Program Exploratorium, San Francisco (2023); Ucross Foundation Fellowship (2019); the MAP Fund for Carbon Song Cycle (2012); among others. Her work has been written about in publications including LUMart, Artspace Magazine, BOMB, Leonardo, Digicult, San Francisco Chronicle, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Artillery.
Christina McPhee's work is held in collections of the International Center of Photography, Rhizome Archive at the New Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Thresholds Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, and others. Her writing appears in book and monograph collections published by Punctum, CTheory, and Intellect Books. After studies in art history and humanities at Scripps College, Claremont and the University of Nebraska, she received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, in painting and printmaking, and her MFA in painting from Boston University School of Visual Arts where she was a student of Philip Guston.
A descendent of Sorbian, Saxon, and Frisian immigrants to the midwest of Turtle Island, in the nineteenth century, Christina McPhee was born in Los Angeles County and grew up on the Great Plains of Turtle Island. She lives at tsɨskikiye, unceded traditional YTT Northern Chumash lands.