Christina McPhee works in a ludic and lucid meditative practice whose origins she traces to childhood. Her mother would prescribe drawing as a way to distract her daughter’s imagination (“go draw it out,” she would suggest): this was a free form complement to disclipine at parochial school, where children were set to task, to (apparently) endless copying of moral phrases on chalkboard, after class). Drawing, as such, became a pharmakon, both a poison to be expelled/expressed, as well as a cure to salve emotional states. In a mode of curative discognition, her drawings reiterate inscriptions, throw off aleatory lines of flight, and merge into adjacent, overlapping, gestural orbits. While it is easy to connect this practice to Surrealist automatic drawing, even to Bataille’s concept of l’informe, for McPhee the catharsis seems to emerge from the act of creation itself, rather than revelation of unconscious trajectories. While certainly personal, little is explicitly biographical in the output. What surfaces is a lifetime of intellectual self-fashioning, developed through years of autodidactic study and the ongoing repetition of learned gestural patterns, culled from a plethora of distinct disciplines. Like a musician able to effortlessly improvise after years of playing repeated scales, McPhee enters this improvisational state of discognition in order to mine and combine the structural forms of different visual vocabularies, from geological and medical diagrams, to genres of cinematic display, to the conjugation of glyph-based languages. In doing so, she presents a multifaceted ficto-criticism: she tells speculative stories within what anthropologist Michael Taussig, calls the “less conscious image realm...the dreamworld of the popular imagination.”6 Future-tripping into a schizo-ecology of molecular aggregates, she maps future behaviors of the carbon cycle, as if, through sustained accumulation of greenhouse gasses, a dense atmosphere might etch Earth’s surfaces with the lines of Venus-like tesserations. Her images invite comparison to the ethico-aesthetics of what Donna Haraway calls the Cthulhucene—and, what a timely endeavor. As Haraway puts it: It matters what stories tell stories, it matters what thoughts think thoughts, it matters what worlds world worlds. That we need to take seriously the acquisition of that kind of skill, emotional, intellectual, material skill, to destabilize our own stories, or retell them with other stories, and vice versa. A kind of serious denormalization of that which is normal is held still, in order to do that which one thinks one is doing. It matters to destabilize worlds of thinking with other worlds of thinking. A dialogic, rather than dialectic, structure of McPhee’s artistic practice corroborates Georges Didi-Huberman’s assertion, in Confronting Images, that “to resemble no longer means, then, a settled state, but a process, an active figuration that, little by little, or all of a sudden, makes two elements touch that previously were separated (or separated according to the order of discourse).” Even the media with which McPhee works refuse, under her direction, to sit still. By drawing on top of painting, she explicitly surfaces the linear scaffolding that more typically serves as the eradicated and inaccessible unconscious of the painted image. In her Double Blind Studies series (2012-), she photographs antecedent drawings, digitally butterflying and displaying them for forensic inspection via lush silver gelatin prints. Already existing at a remove from themselves, these Rorschach-like blots are glutted and gutted. In these dream-works, the box of representation is smashed open. As Didi-Huberman continues, “all contrasts and all differences will be crystallized in the substance of a single image, whereas the same substance will ruin all philosophical quiddity in the splitting up of its subject. Such are the disconcerting poetics of dreams: time is overthrown in them, rent, and logic along with it. Not only do consequences anticipate their causes, they are their causes—and their negation.” Nowhere is this more powerfully expressed than in McPhee’s recent video, Microswarm Patchwalk (2016), which invokes a post-surgical walk down an empty beach, seen through the damaged, but recovering, eye of the artist herself, cut (interspersed and interlaced) by flashes of various coded systems, including previous drawings, remediated by the voracious hunger of the video camera. Instead of the Kantian eye of the connoisseur, for whom, as Kevin Hetherington points out, “aesthetic judgment is the product of a disinterested eye,”here the viewer experiences the world through the artist’s discognitive eye. Discognition does not here imply lack of thought—just the opposite, in fact—but it does link thought, as an ongoing exchange, directly to the flesh-of-the-world. Charlie Gere, in his essay “Slitting Open the Kantian Eye,” discusses “the moment in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un Chien Andalou when a young woman’s eye appears to be slit open. This is the slitting of the Kantian eye, that allows all the heterogeneity to spill from within the subject into the material world of things.” McPhee has participated in her own curative cut, establishing reciprocal feedback around largesse, rather than lack. Hers is not a disinterested eye, but a distracted one, connected to a mind as generative as the world it regards. Such a mind inevitably finds solace and rejuvenation in a discognitive place of repetitive, but also creative, inscription; a (common-)place that is not so common, a place that can never be (just) one.