Christina McPhee
Christina McPhee is an artist based between Los Angeles and central coast California. Her work involves abstraction, sense of place, and regeneration.
Message
Christina McPhee is an artist living and working on traditional Chumash and Salinan territory, in central coast California. Her landscape-based abstractions embody ways of knowing, and a poetics of space concerned with cosmology and crisis. Scientific visualizations and sonifications mesh with field notes and drawings, across layered time-based and still media. Often in collaboration with sound artists, composers, and field scientists, she illuminates environmental histories, climate futures, spirituality, and community. She works in drawing, painting, video, multimedia performance and writing.
"Pattern discognition," as curator James MacDevitt remarks, is a hallmark of her process: open questions around ways of knowing are at the core of her practice. Museum collection highlights include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the International Center of Photography, New York. Recent institutional shows of her work include Christina McPhee: Regeneration at KinoSaito Art Center, NY (2022). Group exhibitions include UCLA Art/Sci Lab's Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption and Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art at Wonzimer Gallery, as part of PST ART : Art & Science Collide, southern California 2024.
Statement
I am a painter and media artist. I work in drawing using many kinds of inks, including gel pens, calligraphy and permanent inks, often on large scale handmade Japanese washi (paper) as well as recycled industrial papers, most recently in black. My painting practice spans multiple levels of medium including oil, oil stick, digital and analogue collage, ink, and dye on canvas. My work in painting is influenced by photographic fragments and cinematic montage, so the sense of time in painting is an important element. I also bring drawing, painting and photographic elements into animations for my landscape based films, a passion of my life that exceeds my original training, and draws on a lifelong fascination with the sense of music in visual art. For me, drawings and paintings are like concrete scores that might be transcribable into sound or even music. I often collaborate with composers and performers to make layered time based works for live performance and installation. My practice extends across five decades, and ranges, in its public form, from exhibitions in non-profit art spaces and museums, to performances in theaters, choreography studios, and outdoor screenings. I love the multiplicity of format and structural contexts for releasing works of art into the wild.
All roads lead through the drawn line, which seems to regenerate continuously in my practice across media and decades. Drawing is a portal through which my practice passes its material effects, and also carries the baggage of stories. Narrative poetics come through as I work, as the canvas, as an object, starts to accumulate and also lose content. Scraps, debris, the parti elements that might stand in for the whole - for something too large to fully perceive— these are obsessions that haunt my practice in the studio, and also recur whenever the objects I make begin to live their own life in spaces and venues, as temporary as they are, and ephemeral. Thematically, I’m obsessed with apparitions, revenants, traces of story and history, dramas of erasure, and regeneration. I grew up on the Great Plains, without television, at a time less than a hundred years after the reverb of settler colonial domination. I come to my practice with a heavy sense of the past and a language of abstraction with which to liberate and inspire us communally.