Christina McPhee
Christina McPhee works with abstract drawing, photography and site.
Her drawings concern the trace performance as built form. Lines become verbs in a territory of diagrams. Diagrams suggest a life presence, or animation. The drawings, as paper objects, resemble torn notebook sheets at architectural scales. They are notations of site after her body and hands have left the scene. The drawings retain a presence-function as if semi-independent subjects, or life forms.
The photograph is also a space for notation. Onsite documentary footage at remote sites moves into remix with displaced scientific motifs, or concerns drawing in remote sites.
Since 2000, McPhee has created a body of photographically based work on sites of environmental crisis and regeneration. She looks at scientific and technological activity as a form of drawing out site. Some works are concerning post oil spill biodiversity (Penumbra Blind, 2012), atmospheric carbon accumulation and global climate change (Tesserae of Venus, 2009), the effects of marine warming and landslides in a coastal village (La Conchita mon amour, 2006-2008), and metaphors of seismic memory as both post-traumatic visualization and geomorphology (Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, 2004-12). Her sonification of carbon absorption on the tallgrass prairie, SlipstreamKonza (2002-3) is one of the first new media works to transpose climate data into an ambient sound and visual installation.
Solo museum exhibitions include American University Museum, Washington, DC and Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden. Recent photographs have been shown with “Mapa: Cartografías críticas” at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (2011). She was an invited artist for Bucharest Biennial 3 (2008) and Documenta 12 (2007)Magazine Project, for which she was a participating editor with -empyre-, Sydney. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum (Artport), Thresholds New Media Collection (Scotland); Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum; Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University (New York), Experimental Television Center (New York), Kemper Museum (Kansas CIty), Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies (Colorado Springs); and in embassies for the Art-in-Embassies program, US Department of State. Her festival and special programs include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with Center for Visual Music) 2011-12; Cinephemere FIAC Paris, 2010; SF Cinematheque 2010; LA Film Forum 2008; and Pacific Film Archive 2006. She has collaborated with composers including Pamela Z and Pauline Oliveros for performance and installation video works at REDCAT, Los Angeles (“Wunderkabinet”),2006 with Z and ISEA 2009, Belfast (“Tesserae of Venus: Ghostdance”) with Oliveros. Her online interactive work is the subject of feminist media criticism, notably, Ellie Mudie, “The Spectacle of Seismicity,” Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), April 2010; and Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices, New York and London: Macmillan, 2009. Grants and awards include the MAP Fund for Performance with Pamela Z (2012); Turbulence.org commission with GH Hovagimyan, New York State Foundation for the Arts (2009); and American Scandinavian Foundation for exhibition at Cartes Center for Art and Technology, Finland (2006).
http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5307
RECENT EXHIBITIONS + SCREENINGS
De-Mobbing: Language, Structure, Bioform. Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, January 22-March 4, 2012
Collections III : Works by Women Artists at Thresholds Artspace, Horsecross, Perth, Scotland, 23 October – February 2012
Expanded Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 28, 2011 – January 31, 2012
Liquid Assets: Perspectives on Water. Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, California, October 16 – January 8, 2012
A Delicate Landscape of Crisis, solo retrospective screening of a decade of short films, Freies Museum Berlin, April 13, 2011
Teorema Drawings, solo exhibition, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, Kansas City, March 23 to May 7, 2011.
Domains, Parameters, Wanderings. Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, Louisiana, January 8 to February 28, 2011.
La Conchita Paradise, video screening, Cinéphémère in the Tuileries Garden, the 37th edition of FIAC, Paris, October 21- October 24, 2010.
Deep Horizon, video screening, Hurricane Season, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, September 15, 2010. With films by Robert Flaherty (excerpts from “Louisiana Story”), Courtney Egan and Helen Hill, Pawel Wojtasik, Lisa Johnson, Christina McPhee, Tony Oursler, Ghen Dennis, and Gretchen Skogerson.
Canyon Variation 4. in Hot and Cold: Abstractions from Nature, group exhibition with work by Julie Mehretu, Christina McPhee, Jasper Johns, Suzanne Caporeal, John Buck, and Alan Gussow, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas CIty, April 20 to October 22, 2010.
La Conchita N=Amour (2008), video installation, Silent City, The Rag Factory, London, May 7-10, 2010
Tesserae of Venus – Ghostdance (2009), video installation, Open Space Art Cologne, curated by Heinrich Schmidt, April 20-23, 2010
Tesserae White Cloud (2010), invitational screening, Crossroads Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Victoria Theatre, April 20, 2010
SALT, video installation, “Because the Night”, curated by LIVEBOX, Aurora Picture Show, DiverseWorks Artspace,, Houston, February 6, 2010
Tesserae of Venus, solo exhibition, photomontage and drawings, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, October 23 to December 5 , 2009
SALT video installation “Because the Night,” Chapman College – Guggenheim Gallery, curated by LIVEBOX, Los Angeles, October 19 – November 13, 2009
Screening, Recipe (evacuee cake), short film, VIBA Festival, Buenos Aires, November 27-29, 2009.
Screening, Seven after Eleven, short film, Cinema by the Bay Festival, Invitational, curated by Sean Uyehara, San Francisco Film Society, Clay Theatre, San Francisco, October 22-25, 2009.
Tesserae of Venus, video installation, ISEA Festival, exhibition, Belfast, August 23 to September 1, 2009, curated by Kathy Rae Huffman
Plazaville, variable cinema installation remake of Godard’s Alphaville, a Turbulence.org commission, Pace Digital Gallery, New York, April 7 – May 15, 2009
Plazaville, variable cinema installation, a Turbulence.org commission with GH Hovagimyan, Pace Digital Gallery, New York, April 4-30, 2009.
Recipe (evacuee cake)/Recette-Gâteaux_à_évacués invitational screening, VIDEOFORMES 09, Clermont-Ferrand, March 10-14, 2009
47REDS, drawing installation, in “Twice Upon a Time,” Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, November 18 2008 – January 10, 2009. Group show with Carla Åhlander, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy Rae Carland, Carola Dertnig, Desiree Holman, Judith Hopf, Christina McPhee, Susanne Winterling and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez.
Recipe (Evacuee Cake), video installation, In Transition Russia 2008, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, -December 2008.
Carrizo Topologies, Bucharest Biennial 2008, curated by Jan-Erik Lindstrom and Johan Solstrom, May-June 2008, Bucharest; and Bildmuseet Umea, Sweden, October-November 2008 (catalog).
Carrizoprime, First Sight Scene, LA Film Forum, Egyptian Theatre, January 27, 2008
La Conchita N=amour, 22 screen, 3 channel video installation, Horsecross. Commission for Threshold Wave, Perth, Scotland, October 2007 – April 2008
RECENT PRESS / REVIEWS / BOOKS
Ella Mudie, “The Spectacle of Seismicity,” Leonardo (MIT Press Journals), volume 43, issue 2, April 2010.
Representations of earthquakes in visual art have the potential to function as spectacles (defined as striking or dramatic public displays); this in turn provokes consideration of how viewers construct meaning from such representations. The author examines the work of a number of artists arguably concerned with going beyond spectacular representations in their portrayals of earthquake activity. Particular focus is placed upon performative techniques meant not only to engage audiences with the properties of seismic phenomena but also to stimulate reflection on the complex psychological responses they may trigger, as well as their analogous relationships to conditions of environmental and cultural crisis. Reviews of work by Natalie Jeremijenko, DV Rogers, Christina McPhee, et al. With cover art by Christina McPhee, video still from SALT (2004) . Abstract and citations.
Melissa Potter, “Interview: Christina McPhee.” http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5307 BOMB Magazine,Bomblog, New York. First release online (ongoing) from October 26, 2009.
Sharon Lin Tay, PhD, Women on the Edge:Twelve Political Film Practices. New York: Macmillan/ London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-230-21776-8
Women on the Edge re-envisions women’s cinema as contemporary political practices by exploring theworks of twelve filmmakers: Hollywood cinema (Sofia Coppola), European arthouse fare (Sally Potter, Liv Ullmann), the political documentary (Jill Craigie, Kim Longinotto, Liz Miller), world cinema (Guo Xiaolu, Deepa Mehta), the video essay (Ursula Biemann), as well as independent and multi-platformed works (Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, Christina McPhee and Gisela Sanders Alcántara)..
Leigh Markopoulos, “Iraqi Eye”, SF Camerawork JOURNAL, vol 36, no. 1, 2009.