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SAINTS AND SUPERNATURALS: Paintings by Christina Mcphee
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Performing arts Center
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San Luis Obispo, California
​22 October 2024 - 30 June 2025​​​
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​curated by Heather Gray
Presented in association with Left Field Gallery
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[PDF]​
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Following the intensities of line and an intuitive textuality, drawing becomes a vehicle for ephemeral effects in the work of Christina McPhee. “One gets the sense that the image conjured up is all at once a particular, individual, material composite (colored ink, graphite, paper, the slip of a hand) and a precarious, temporary, expression of forces for which no adequate, human language exists...” (Ina Blom). Her paintings, initially acquiescing to a sense of graffiti on walls, swerve into an event-space that recalls the strange gatherings of unknown characters on the edge of a city, like the Scherzi drawings of Tiepolo. Goddess Athena allows a glimpse: did she just reach down to undo the knot on her sandal? She’ll go barefoot on her own sacred ground. Up from the underworld, Persephone will have caught some rays on the beach at Morro Bay, mud in her hair. Images manifest as partial views or the fleeting shadows of a performance. As dramas of erasure and recursion, the drawing-to-painting matrix sustains a mood of temporal pathos, recalling the eighteenth century meditation on the clown Pierrot Lunaire, by the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, as well as the ambiguous figuration of body and event in the paintings of the twentieth century American surrealist Dorothea Tanning. Stigmata as scraps of paper, flying debris, and the parti elements that might stand in for something too large to fully perceive, indicate a generous scope of possibility for painting as a lived experience on the threshold of theatre.
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