THEATER/GALLERY

Christina McPhee: Regeneration

4 Mar. – 24 Apr. 2022

Christina McPhee makes collapsing and regenerating landscapes that blend technological precision with notions about place-making and interspecies community. A native of California, she traces her practice of drawing in nature to her childhood in the rural West, where resource exploitation manifests in earthquakes, wildfires, oil spills, and species loss. This exhibition draws upon McPhee’s decades-long exploration of remote places, personal histories, and sojourns both spiritual and ecological. McPhee’s abstract compositions are built up within a matrix of fractured surfaces, vibrant colors, and a web-like layering of transparent effects. Residual smudges of pencil and paint imprint the artist’s presence long after she has stepped away from paper, canvas or screen. Although she works across a range of media, the drawn line is always central, forming a connective tissue within and between works that join elements into cosmologies and vast interrelated systems. Six significant videos from 2010 -2022 are shown here in rotation. Yes! Lord: Paradise Remix (2021), a kaleidoscopic fusion of saturated images and music, evokes a complex Edenic mashup of animation, choreosonic and minimalist sound, and is a collaboration with scholar-artist Ashon Crawley. Other videos involve a crisis of breathing, the body, and climate change, and perform healing for traumatic memory. All reference our relationship to a fragile world within and beyond the human.

Curated by Beth Venn.