Medrie MacPhee

Medrie MacPhee, 610-3356, Plywood and existing architecture, fourth floor opening dimensions: 84" × 16", 2008. Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American painter based in New York City. She works in distinct painting and drawing series that have explored the juncture of abstraction and representation, relationships between architecture, machines, technology and human evolution, and states of flux and transformation. In the 1990s and 2000s, she gained attention for metaphorical paintings of industrial subjects and organic-machine and bio-technological forms. In later work, she explored architectural instability before turning to semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged pieces of garments fit together like puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described as "powerfully flat, more literal than abstract" with "an adamant, witty physicality."

MacPhee has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, National Endowment for the Arts and American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Her work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. She has taught at Bard College, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design and Sarah Lawrence College. During a class trip to New York City in 1976, she was drawn to the city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban environment and soon arranged to study there through an exchange program. After earning her BFA later that year, she permanently moved to New York, working a series of odd jobs while producing art out of various studios in Manhattan before settling in a Bowery loft studio from 1990 to 2013. Phillipe Daverio Gallery (1991) and Paolo Baldacci Gallery (1992–7) in New York, and Mira Godard Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990). Despite her work's range, critics have identified several unifying themes: an anthropomorphizing impulse that examines how the built and machine worlds mirror psychological states; interest in processes of disintegration, metamorphosis or evolution; exploration of the past as a pointer to the future; open-ended meaning; and humor. In formal terms, these themes translate into her use of collage, attention to the expressive qualities of materials and painted surfaces, and ambiguous, often disorienting uses of space and scale. The series recombines her vocabulary into visceral, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops and organs, set in vague, garishly colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998). She painted them in vinyl polymer, taking advantage of its hardness, matte opacity and artificial color to shift from her earlier atmospherics to more directly experienced painting spaces influenced by Italian frescoes. The strategy developed out of bespoke hats and garments that she had stitched together for friends from casual castoff clothing fragments. Asheville Art Museum, Canada Council Art Bank, National Academy of Art and Design, Palmer Museum of Art, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.