TEOREMA DRAWINGS
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...
"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 the wake of the 2008 recession: as with many other independent artists, support for the practice was suddenly very hard to find. 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 (see quotation below).
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 carbon cycle songs after Lime Kiln: It Was An Accident (Teorema 33).
Exhibitions:
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