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.
Early life and career
MacPhee was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 and studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 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.
In New York, the subject matter of her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring relationships between structures, the body and human evolution. She received critical attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later 1980s, through solo exhibitions at 49th Parallel (1988) Phillipe Daverio Gallery (1991) and Paolo Baldacci Gallery (1992–7) in New York, Concordia University (Montreal, 1988), and Mira Godard Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).
Work and reception
MacPhee's work has moved from metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of representation, abstraction, biology and technology to more abstract works that nonetheless incorporate real-world objects and allusion. 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.
"Industrial" series
MacPhee's early industrial paintings presented enigmatic, sometimes fantastical exteriors of abandoned structures and aging machinery drawn from the decaying industrial environment of New York and Montreal's harbor front: silos, water towers, holding tanks, viaducts, conveyers, conduits, container piers. The paintings emphasized draftsmanship—with lines and hard edges defining large modeled volumes—as well as varied surfaces of dry, scraped areas, thin turpentine washes and sewn-on canvas, dramatic shifts between close-ups and vast expanse, and chiaroscuro lighting evoking a poignant, forlorn quality. Artforum'''s Ronnie Cohen described MacPhee's approach as part objective and part romantic, with imagination informing "fascinating transfigurations of things, imbuing them with a vital anthropomorphism."
Critics made comparisons to the somber metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper and visionary scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for the female body, nature or human development (e.g., Self-Portrait in the Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between man and machine, obsolescence, survival and the exhaustion of modernist utopianism. Art in America's Robert Berlind wrote that MacPhee "invert(ed) the post-Cubist tradition of abstracted, machine-like figuration," finding life, sexuality and "the pathos of extinction" in industrial relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).