Solo Show Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, April 2021

14 November, 2021

Medrie MacPhee’s presented new paintings and works on paper at Toronto’s Nicholas Metivier Gallery, from April 1-24, 2021. The exhibition was titled The Weight of Matter. It was her first solo show at the venue. Due to Covid-pandemic related public health restrictions, the show was closed to the public after one week.

From the Nicholas Metivier Gallery press release:

Medrie MacPhee’s innovative approach to space, colour and form is widely admired and respected in both Canada and abroad. Over the years, her work has evolved from architectural landscapes to abstraction, with the concepts of construction, momentum, collapse and renewal remaining central to her practice. A significant shift in MacPhee’s process occurred when she began adhering ordinary materials — clothing, zippers, buttons and fabric — to her canvases. The resulting chromatic patterns she creates using this framework are entirely abstract and yet reference their origins in the subtle presence of human-body derived shapes and contours.

Central to this exhibition is an 8’ by 10’ painting titled, Dark Matter (2020). The title came to MacPhee during the making of the work when she learned about the mysterious substance that is dark matter. Emitting no light, reflection or shadow, it is essentially the gravitational force keeping the solar system from flying apart. This theory resonated with MacPhee as she sees her own process of affixing clothing to canvas as the creation of an underlying matrix or scaffolding, out of which comes endless possibilities for her to explore. For this particular work, MacPhee limited the palette to black and white except for a small blue stripe in the top right quadrant. The simplified palette and bold composition recall the work of Paul-Émile Borduas and Robert Motherwell.

Other works in the exhibition, such as Zest (2020), have been inspired by moments in her recent memory like the specific quality of light she experienced at an artists’ residency, The Bogliasco Foundation, on the Ligurian coast near Genoa in 2019. Social Distance (2020), on the other hand, memorializes an extremely fruitful and concentrated period of working in her studio without the distraction of a social life. MacPhee notes that, “for those of us privileged enough to just stay home and concentrate on whatever vocations we had there was a strange silver lining to the isolation.”

 

Installation views of the exhibition courtesy of the Nicholas Metivier Gallery.