Medrie MacPhee included in Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection

15 May, 2023

Medrie MacPhee’s 2020 painting Favela is featured in this book that explores the bold vision and vast range of achievements of women artists working predominantly across North America from the late 1960s into the present moment. The paintings, sculpture and mixed-media works featured are drawn from the Shah Garg Collection, which is dedicated to illuminating the critical role that women have played in shaping the development of abstraction and the narratives of art. Making Their Mark includes two sweeping essays by editors Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel, writings by six scholars, as well as lively texts by 15 artists about the artists who inspire them. Richly illustrated with works by 136 artists.

Find out more and order here.

Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel (ed.), Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, Gregory R. Miller & Co., New York, NY, 2023, 432 pgs.

Video of Medrie MacPhee Discussing Seeing is Knowing

15 May, 2023

Medrie MacPhee openly discusses her creative process in relation to her latest solo exhibition, Seeing is Knowing (Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, March 30 to April 30, 2023). She describes how the breach of applying disassembled clothing onto the canvas allowed her to approach abstract painting in a way she couldn’t before; she responds to the structure and references that they provide and works beyond from there. Produced by Nicholas Metivier Gallery, the video has close up shots of the paintings give a strong sense of their surface and texture.

Click to view on Vimeo | Click to view on Nicholas Metivier Gallery website

Solo Show Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

7 March, 2023

Medrie MacPhee is presenting new paintings at Toronto’s Nicholas Metivier Gallery (190 Richmond Street East), from March 30 to April 30, 2023. The exhibition is titled Seeing is Knowing.

Click here for more information…

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Seeing is Knowing continues Medrie MacPhee’s acclaimed series that transforms second hand clothing into an intricate matrix that acts as the foundation for her paintings. Several years ago, she had a breakthrough when she pinned a single sock to a canvas. A major breach in her sensibility, it opened up a new way of working that resisted figurative representation. Instead of looking into space like a window, the collaged fabric brings the focus to the surface. Her recent works engage with the world in different ways, including its references to the body.

MacPhee’s titles help to illustrate her intuitive thought process, connecting abstraction to reality. A rope-like, linear work titled Eva, is an homage to Eva Hesse while a monochromatic blue painting punctuated by two small yellow squares is titled, Canary, (as in the canary in the coal mine metaphor). In other works, she alludes the act of making. I’m Staying, a painting that includes a large section of exposed plaid fabric, protests its inevitable painted surface, and wins.

The exhibition also includes two of MacPhee’s garments which are also made from second-hand clothing. This is the first time these have been exhibited alongside the paintings. While not intended to be worn, they can be and are equipped with zippers and pockets. They emphasize MacPhee’s dark sense of humour, taking what was once considered an anti-feminist skill and subverting it to align with her unique visual language.

“Dark humor is core to my view of humans and their strivings that are always getting in the way of often inchoate emotions. It turns the unbearable, bearable. I don’t make “humorous” paintings but the fact of their existence is. The “architecture” of the painting is braced by the clothing underneath. The clothing has no dignity when it’s being pawed over in a second-hand bin. There’s a kind of Beckett-ian humor in elevating these sad remainders into a new and loftier realm.” – Medrie MacPhee

source: Nicholas Metivier Gallery website

Come A Little Closer at DC Moore Gallery NYC

12 January, 2023

Medrie MacPhee is included in a large group exhibition of small paintings with 70 other artists entitled Come a Little Closer. It runs from January 12 to February 11, 2023 at DC Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY.

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“I remember once walking with Jacob Lawrence into his major Phillips Collection exhibition in Washington. On the entrance wall, the curators had made a HUGE mural-sized photo blow-up of one of the works from his Migration Series. It looked stunning. But then as we walked through the show, we came to the same work. Relatively tiny, not much bigger than Jacob’s two hands. It was even more powerful, more mesmerizing, more inviting. It did not need to be wall sized to hold the wall, and that is something that Jake had known.”

Bridget Moore’s memory of a small, powerful Jacob Lawrence painting was the spark for Come a Little Closer, which gathers an unruly sampling of ostensibly “little” works with major impact. We all love big; we love the drama of scale. But intimacy has its own magic, connecting us to the size of books, of faces, of mirrors, of things glimpsed in private, seen by one person at a time. Or not seen in full until the curious viewer steps closer.

The works in this exhibition measure from tiny to 15”. The artists that created them have varied motivations, but all the works are meant to be the size they are; in other words none are preparatory studies. Some play with ideas of “real scale,” some counter our expectations of detail, others luxuriate in the compression of information.

– source DC Moore Gallery Press Release