BIOGRAPHY
Christina McPhee (b. 1954) is an American visual and media artist. Of European Sorbian, Saxon, and Frieslander descent, she was born in Los Angeles County, California. She grew up on the Great Plains in Nebraska; studied at Scripps College, Claremont and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; she was awarded the BFA in painting and printmaking at Kansas City Art Institute; and the MFA in painting at Boston University, where she was in the last cohort of students taught by Philip Guston. She lives and works as an uninvited guest on unceded lands of Salinan and Chumash people on the Pacific coast of Turtle Island.
Drawing and the proximities of writing, mark-making and performance to drawing are core practices in all her work, extending to collaged topologic paintings, as well as video performance works that involve animations of live drawing. She approaches drawing as a method to open up perceptions of layers of time, human presence, and ecological survivance in landscape, especially the American west. Her exhibition history since 2000 has involved shows, installations, performances and screenings in the UK, Germany, Croatia, Canada, and in many US venues. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California, and Kino Saito Art Center in Hudson Valley, New York. She has been an artist fellow at Ucross Foundation. Awards include grant funding from the MAP Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts for Carbon Song Cycle, her intermedia collaboration with Pamela Z. Her practice in drawing, painting, video, photomontage, and writing involves material connections and between ecologies of landscape, literature, sound work, and listening. Themes include seismic memory, as the overlay of geographical fault data from earthquakes with human grief and trauma carried within our neural pathways. and telemimetic landscapes 'that blend technological precision with notions about place-making, spirituality, and more-than-human community." (Beth Venn, catalog, Christina McPhee: Regeneration, KinoSaito, 2022).
Recent solo exhibitions in public / nonprofit venues include Diagramming Sentences at Museum of Contemporary Art-MCASB, Santa Barbara, CA, 2026; In Performance: Saints and Supernaturals, Performing Arts Center, San Luis Obispo, CA, 2024-25; Regeneration at KinoSaito Art Center, Verplanck, New York, 2022; and Shapeshifters (after the Enigmas of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz), Irenic Projects, Pasadena, CA, 2020. Forthcoming and recent group shows include Artport: A History of Internet Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2026; An Artistic Legacy: Scripps at 100, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, 2026; Grief Work at Material, Salt Lake City, 2026; Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art, at Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, and Atmospheres of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption, at UCLA's Sci-Art Lab with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, 2024-2025; Here in a Homemade Forest: Common Reading Connections, at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, Pullman, 2023-24; Otherwise/Revival at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, 2021; among others. Carbon Song Cycle, a collaboration with Pamela Z for voice, electronics and expanded cinema, most recently was staged at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, in 2023.
Her work is held in the public collections of the International Center of Photography, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Thresholds Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University; Great Plains Art Collection and Sheldon Art Museum, University of Nebraska - Lincoln; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College; Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; among others.
ARTISTS STATEMENT
I investigate ways of knowing through methodologies of pattern discognition, translation, and transcription. My quasi-forensic observations research multiple language systems, layering visual and sonic, scientific and poetic data within drawing, painting, video and photography. Through drawing as a transdisciplinary practice, I engage through embodied knowledge and the sense of the open work, within a context of speculative fiction and the sense of paradise as proximate (near), warped/tesserated, and approximate—a quantum site. Across painting and drawing, as well as multiples including prints and 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 my 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 I call 'seismic memory,' or the notion of a feedback loop between telluric processes and persistence of traumatic visualization in human and more-than-human life. My work is motivated by Fluxus historically, and participates in reparations and healing through the practice and performance of topologic drawing. Land back is visualized against the pervasive backgrounds of categorical erasures. A commitment to fugue-like topologic structures of thought and material incorporates scientific visualization as well as visual music. Histories of landscape painting in a global context, from Japanese nihonga to eighteenth century rococo sketches, are core resources. Multiplicity, doubling, shattering, erasure, shadowing, and pentimenti characterize the physical, drawn-out, and extended effects of this research. Landscape is hypo-objective, not sub-alternative, continuously nascent, a subject of connaissance and reconnaissance.
CV 08.2026(LONG FORM)