TEOREMA DRAWINGS
Christina McPhee: Teorema Drawings, Cara y Cabezas Contemporary, Kansas City, Missouri 2011,Curated by Cara Megan Lewis
Four Core Chambers, Martina Johnston Gallery, Berkeley, California 2013,Curated by Katie Anania
Demobbing: Landscape, Structure, Bioform, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California 2013, Curated by Brian Karl
Domains, Parameters, Wanderings, Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, Louisiana, 2011, Curated by Brian Guidry
Teorema. A provisional observation. Thinking through Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema, I undertook to draw an arrival, on every large sheet of paper in my drawing shed. The arriviste, the other invited, made to feel at home. Then to let the consequences ensue.
"McPhee has been translating external and internal environments for decades. In her large-scale abstract drawings, she processes and releases the violence enacted in the land—oil spills, earthquakes, fire—as well as traumas to the body through a layering of glyph-like marks and uncontrolled washes. Her works conjure lamentation and praise simultaneously."
- Cara Megan Lewis
This body of work spanned a difficult period in my life, in which most of the supports I had for the practice appeared to vanish. In the wake of loss, Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's exploration of community as constituted by the loss of immanence, in his book Inoperable Community, made sense in this context. I made the Teoremas an an antidote to the poisons of alienation, my own as well as those in larger cultural landscapes. I worked through sites of environmental stress like Lime Kiln where redwoods were destroyed to process lime for Portland cement in the nineteenth century. I considered the proximity of Futurist ideology from Depression-era Italy to the accelerationist ideology popular at that time among my intellectual cohort. Ironically, my teoremas were not well understood as having anything to do with Pasolini's aesthetics and ethics: instead were taken as the poster child for 'speculative / object-oriented ontology.' The material excess of marks flying around inspired strange observations. How perfectly ironic that indeed the Teorema drawings are strangers, are strange.
Pamela Z, my collaborative partner on our performance work Carbon Song Cycle (2013-23), wrote one of the songs after Lime Kiln: It Was An Accident (Teorema 33).
Jean-Luc Nancy:
"So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us-question, waiting, event, imperative-in the wake of society.
Nothing, therefore, has been lost, and for this reason nothing is lost. We alone are lost, we upon whom the "social bond" (relations, communication), our own invention, now descends heavily like the net of an economic, technical, political, and cultural snare. Entangled in its meshes, we have wrung for ourselves the phantasms of the lost community.
What this community has "lost"-the immanence and the intimacy of a communion-is lost only in the sense that such a "loss" is constitutive of "community" itself.
It is not a loss: on the contrary, immanence, if it were to come about, would instantly suppress community, or communication, as such. Death is not only the example of this, it is its truth. In death, at least if one considers in it what brings about immanence (decomposition leading back to nature- "everything returns to the ground and becomes part of the cycle"-or else the paradisal versions of the same "cycle") and if one forgets what makes it always irreducibly singular, there is no longer any community or communication: there is only the continuous identity of atoms."