----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
hi -empyreans-
it's nice to be back in touch and thanks, Renate, for suggesting we pitch in
our bios. Here'a a recent highlights bio, see below. Greatest hits or
something. I tried to write a more personal account than I usually do.
I'm very glad to hear back via private email if any of you would like more info
on my projects.
very best regards
Christina
http://www.christinamcphee.net/about/
Christina McPhee is a media and visual artist whose work is involved in the
‘deep ecology’ of topologic mark-making, abstraction, and illumination. Her
work often engages site and territory, integrates scientific data into
sonified, time-based and visual images, and reflects on excess and beauty at
the edges of architecture and natural science.
Christina McPhee was born in Los Angeles in 1954. Her family moved to Nebraska
when she was seven and she grew up on the edge of a small prairie town, and
taught herself drawing. A voracious reader, she was also influenced by an
intense involvement in piano and classical music, and, via minimal contact
with the media culture of the period, a childhood of making things. She
returned to Los Angeles with a full scholarship at Scripps College, Claremont,
then transferred to Kansas City Art Institute to study painting (BFA 1976
valedictorian). She worked at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard,
then studied at Boston University School for the Arts. She was a student of
Philip Guston during his last two years of teaching, and graduated with the
MFA in painting in 1979. Throughout the eighties she pursued landcape and
topologic large scale drawing studies of archeological-architectural studies in
the American West. She raised two children in Kansas City, Missouri, taught
drawing at the Kansas City Art Institute, and organized exhibitions in the
region and mountain west. In the late nineties she started to do remote
performance and video projects using nascent desktop editing software, and from
2002 on become a pioneer in new media arts internationally. She moved to
California to continue work in media and drawing at remote technological
landscapes, involving abstraction and montage around her documentary shots of
ecological crisis at energy producing sites. Her projects on seismic memory
and on sonification of carbon sink data were among the first media projects to
dwell in a discourse between architectural space, performance, science and
early modernist abstraction. She curated and moderated the Sydney-based
-empyre- list serv for digital medi arts and culture from 2003-2008, and was
participating editor on behalf of -empyre- when it was invited to contribute
and exhibit at Documenta 12 (Halle), Kassel 2007. She taught for several years
in the new media graduate program at UC Santa Cruz; then left academia to
concentrate full time on production. She shot and edited a series of short
films on deepwater life in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill, at the
invitation of biologists at the University of Louisiana. Her newest projects
(2013) involve painting and drawing conceptually driven ‘carbon cycle models.’
She works with layered, linear sequences and formal structures, often
interpolating poetic, political, and scientific data within topologic glyphs.
She is based in San Francisco and the central coast of California.
Solo museum exhibitions include American University Museum, Washington, DC and
Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden, and Freies Museum, Berlin (video retrospective).
Recent group exhibitions include Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art
Medellin; Headlands Center for the Arts, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(with Center for Visual Music), and Berkeley Art Museum- Pacific Film Archive.
Public collections of her work include New Museum of Contemporary Art-Rhizome
Artbase; Whitney Museum of American Art-Artport; Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center/Taylor Museum; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Thresholds New Media
Collection, Scotland; and the United States Department of State Art in
Embassies. She is a MAP Fund for Performance grantee (2012) with Pamela Z for
Carbon Song Cycle, a performance work for chamber ensemble, voice, electronics
and video (2013), which premiered at Berkeley Art Museum in April 2013.. Other
awards and support include Turbulence/NY State Foundation for the Arts with GH
Hovagimyan for “Plazaville” (2009) Documenta 12 Magazine Project (travel and
participation support) (2007); American Scandinavian Foundation (exhibition
support), 2006; Experimental Television Center, New York (production support);
HUMLab visiting artist residency, Umea Universitat, Sweden (2005); Lounge|lab
residency and exhibtion support, Bauhaus-Universitat, Weimar (2003), and Banff
Center for the Arts (residency, Media and Visual Arts, 2000).
Christina McPhee’s time based work on Vimeo including clips from Shed Cubed,
Carbon Song Cycle, Tesserae of Venus and Naxsmash projects is accessed at
https://vimeo.com/christinamcphee
Her artist’s site, including a catalog raisonnee of works on paper,
photomontage and painting, together with writings and reviews is
http://christinamcphee.net
Artist’s Resume // recent highlights 2007 to the present
June 2013
RECENT EXHIBITIONS + SCREENINGS
“Carbon Song Cycle,” immersive 12 channel live video installation by Christina
McPhee, in collaboration with Pamela Z (musical performance0, Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive, L@TE series, April 2013.
“Thirty Something”, Storefront for Art and Architecture, curated benefit
exhibition, Beekman Place, New York, March 2013.
SHED CUBED, 4 channel /Dolby 5.1 sound video installation with related
photographs and drawings by Christina McPhee, in Markers: Christina McPhee and
Ryan Chard Smith, KROWSWORK project space, Oakland, California, September 7 –
October 13, 2012
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, by GH
Hovagimyan and Christina McPhee, produced with Artists Meeting and
Turbulence.org commission-NY State Foundation for the Arts, Pace Digital
Gallery, New York, April 7 – May 15, 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.
_______________________________________________
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