Christin
In a career over four decades, Christina McPhee (b. 1954) has worked within a matrix of drawing, wherein graphical scores for music, literary and textual translation, montage and collage of scientific visualization converge. Art histories of landscape painting in a global context, from Japanese nihonga to eighteenth and nineteenth century veduta and rococo sketches, are core resources in her work. Multiplicity, doubling, shattering, erasure, shadowing, and pentimenti characterize the drawn effects of this research. Many of her works, from the nineties through 2020, have engage the post-colonial American western landscape as an abstraction which derives from what she describes as seismic memory, intimating a cybernetic feedback between the earth's telluric forces and human trauma. Recent drawings and paintings engage with theatricality and performance, with more-than-human comedic animations drawn from the stories of popular saints and mythic creatures, from Saint Francis to Melusine. Yet the ambient mood of displacement and reflective meditation also manifests through her use of low relief effects in new paintings that adumbrate hyper-objective conditions of life, things that cannot be directly seen, into newly recaptured and nascent visual fields. These objects carry an intense presence or quality of embodiment because of the strong presence of hand-work via almost hyper-vigilant, hypnotic drawing. Thresholds are constant on the verge of reach. Shifting moire effects in ink recall tapestry and intense craft. She uses the neologism 'naxsmash' to indicate a poetics of simultaneous birthing and fragmentation across the body in drawing, painting, photomontage, and video. She has collaborated with field scientists, composers and musicians in live and recorded works for performance since 2005. Her writings in new media theory and culture as well as occasional criticism are extensions of her intense engagement with, and commitment to ways of working in fugue-like topologic structures of thought and material.
Christina McPhee has presented solo exhibitions at KinoSaito Art Center, Verplanck (Hudson Valley, New York); Left Field Gallery, Los Osos; Irenic Projects, Pasadena; Cerritos College Gallery, Norwalk (Los Angeles County); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; American University Museum / Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; Sara Tecchia, New York; among others. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions with the Art/Science Lab, University of California-Los Angeles as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide; Wonzimer, KP Projects, 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; Bridge Projects, Los Angeles; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco; 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, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Thresholds Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, and others. Her writing appears in collections published by Punctum, CTheory, and Intellect Books. A student of Philip Guston, in his last two years of teaching, Christina McPhee earned the MFA in painting at Boston University. She studied at Kansas City Art Insititute (BFA, painting and printmaking, valedictorian), University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Scripps College, Claremont, California. Born in Los Angeles County, she lives on California's central coaston unceded Chumash and Salinan lands.