Christina McPhee
Christina McPhee works in drawing, painting, video and photomontage on California's central coast.
Message
Christina's work across video, drawing, photomontage and painting has shown in museum exhibitions at the American University Museum and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. Her museum collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, and Rhizome Artbase, New York and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Solo exhibitions include Left Field Gallery, Irenic Projects, Cerritos College Art Gallery, and Jessica Silverman galleries in California; Sara Tecchia Roma New York; Center for Visual Music at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and commissioned for the Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. She was a participating artist editor with the Documenta 12 Magazine Project. Her artist's writing on media arts theory and culture appear in books published by CTheory and Intellect Books. She is a recipient, together with Pamela Z, of a MAP Fund award to support the creation of Carbon Song Cycle, a multi-channel video and chamber music work, which premiered at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. It was in revival at the Exploratorium, San Francisco in August 2023. She will participate as an artist in the 2024-5 PST Art/Science initiative.
Christina McPhee makes collapsing and regenerating landscapes that blend technological precision with notions about place-making and interspecies community. Her work across media including painting, photomontage, video, and multimedia performance, is a celebration of improvisation in drawing, and links visual art to sonic and scientific topologies around the sense of place. She lives and works as an uninvited guest in the unceded territories of Chumash and Salinan communities in central coast California. Born in Pomona, Los Angeles County, California, McPhee's undergraduate studies were at Scripps College, Claremont, and the University of Nebraska; later she earned the BFA in painting and printmaking at Kansas City Art Institute, where she was a student of Stanley Lewis and Wilbur Niewald. She studied with Philip Guston at Boston University for the MFA in painting, during his last year of mentoring young painters. As a teaching artist, she has been honored with residencies at the HumLab at the University of Umea, Sweden; Columbia College Chicago, Scripps College (as Langland Alumnae in Residence); and as lecturer in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at University of California-Santa Cruz. She is a 2019 Ucross Foundation Fellow.
Statement
My work lands in drawing, painting, photography and time based media. To connect the interior life, the life of the spirit, with and through landscape is a constant. Because of this obsession my work is often concerned with site, topologies and the sense of place. As a practice that draws on the spaces of experience in the land, my art mediates 'seismic memory' -- or, the concept that post traumatic stress disorder is pandemic and exists in a cybernetic feedback loop with the environments people create to control 'nature'. The prospect of working 'in' nature, in practice becomes an extended study of site and meditation on architectural, writerly, textual and sculptural interventions within a matrix of abstract painting and drawing. My invented landscapes arise from the heart space of experience of a broken world. Yet, and, they are for me, and I hope for those who meet in them, landscapes that animate and expand, like waves of voices, a choreosonic witness to the joy of life.
I consider the construction of landscape as a performance of voice. Landscape is literally manifest, or comes into vision and touch, through the process of a visual speech. The writing desire, the writing through the body, all are close cognates from literature and lyrics that, like chimera, haunt the studio practice. I draw as a first form of encounter. Chroma, crowded, unruly and restless, move between cacophonies in simultaneous contrast, when I move into paint. Some implied metonomy opens up, between the sculptural solidity of the canvas on a formal level and the discognitive iris of my eyes. Is there a largesse here, a fire of encounter, for healing?
In former days around here, people say they could walk across the backs of the salmon as they shot upstream to spawn. So rich was the life of this world. May it come to be so again.Thank you for spending time with and in it with me.