Medrie MacPhee, Take me to the River

My work process begins with scavenging for old clothes and trips to 99 cent and discount stores. The clothing is glued onto a canvas to create a matrix out of which the painting emerges. Although the paintings are non-depictive, the identifiable “real” things (elements of fabric and clothing and “notions,” such as zippers and buttons)–in combination with the stretched, striated, and layered surfaces–suggest the structure of language itself. What we experience as the pauses and gaps and the subterranean feeling and instincts that lie under words is equally manifest in the visual realm. Clothing maps what is essentially two-dimensional cloth on to a three-dimensional bodily space. This current work does that in reverse order and, as such, catches that transaction in the middle of the exchange. It calls up the human presence–people and their clothing–and can therefore extend ideas of language, architecture, class and sensibility.