Christina McPhee Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

LISTENING TO TEENAGE TRAGEDIES, 2014 ink, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano artistico drawing paper,  22 x 30  inches /  558 x 762 mm  unframed Christina McPhee’s expansive abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and videos test or query how can we know, and who is we? Moving from within a matrix of measurement, observation and contingent effects, her work resists characterization as product, and continually accesses fields outside itself. For her, process equals trial. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, from a perspective of the non-self– a world beyond identity. McPhee’s dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the ‘dazzle ships’ of camouflage in war. She revamps architectural elements, data visualizations and special effects through line work and colour, sparking and pulling the image from the object that tries to contain it. Christina McPhee’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Solo museum exhibitions include American University Museum, Washington DC and Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions, notably Documenta 12, Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art Medellin, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Paco des Artes-Sao Paulo, and the ICA, London. Christina McPhee was born in Los Angeles County. She studied at Scripps College Claremont, Kansas City Art Institute (BFA), and Boston University (MFA), where she was a student of Philip Guston. She lives and works in central coast California.