This groundbreaking presentation assembles a significant number of Christina McPhee’s large-scale abstract paintings, several of her smaller gestural drawings, selections from her ongoing photographic Double Blind Studies series, and a new video collage, Microswarm Patchwork. With the debut of SECOND SIGHT, McPhee aspires to become the paradoxical incendiary spark of the after-burn, merging the over-written with layers of the undone, channeling voice-overs in excessive translation. Through multi-layered works in painting, drawing, photography, and video, she creates fluid, intricate line systems that mesh and contract in bravura-comical allusions to anime, graffiti, and the lost art of handwriting.
Her paintings are constructed using a laborious ink-over-oil process, whereby drawing, typically thought of as the primal under-layment, becomes the top-most layer, an illumination, on top of painted and incised surfaces. Each work expertly pulls from, and combines, multiple specialized codes; variously excavating the entomological futures of classical Mayan grammar, dipping into the alphabet soup of deep-sea taxonomies in the post-oil spill Gulf of Mexico, and setting to war the chemical transcriptions of synthetic estrogen and commercial weed-killer.
Her performative engagement with drawing vibrantly animates a dense montage, colliding semi-legible transcriptions of fragile ecologies and seismic landscapes with seductive surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making; lines throw down rope-like bridges, a cat’s-cradle network of convergent signifiers; cached and clustered, fragments take exception to systems.
The lush photographs from her Double Blind Studies series consist of Rorschach-like gelatin silver prints, pseudo-documents of her own paintings, dissected and butterflied into an ambiguous display exerting a strong forensic affect that calls into question the nature of contextualized perception and the illusive finality of the creative act itself.