My paintings document site-specific, performative events that I stage in collaboration with people in my life. These gatherings, whether a devised play or a séance, are structured around shared fictions that evolve through repetition. Often drawing from historical myths and rituals (such as the Greek myth of Asclepius or the American folklore creature the Hidebehind), each narrative unfolds across multiple iterations and retellings. Within this framework, I explore how personal and collective experience intersect, blur, and fragment over time.

In translating these ephemeral events into images, I focus on the gaps that emerge: how absence is evoked, how memory fragments and reforms, and how representation mediates embodiment and collective experience. Each painting becomes a distilled scene shaped by affective logics – composition, line, and color guided by sensation and emotion rather than strict mimetic depiction. The process is both physical and cyclical, made and unmade through layered gestures of remembering and forgetting. I am particularly interested in what resists capture, what dissolves, and what persists only as trace. In this way, painting functions simultaneously as performance and document, probing the limits of translation and the threshold between presence and loss.



Amy MacKay is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from UC Irvine in 2018 and BA from Bard College in 2007. Through an intensive research based process, she makes paintings based on documentation of site-specific, performative events she stages with people in her life. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as La Beast Gallery, Baert Gallery and the Honolulu Museum. MacKay is also one of the founders of the after hours gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, and the arts initiative Group Practice.