Christina McPhee
dal 18/10/2006 al 21/11/2006
Segnalato da
18/10/2006
Christina McPhee
Sara Tecchia Roma New York, New York
La Conchita Mon Amour. With her photography, video, net art and drawing, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity between natural disaster and human trauma using the tiny coastal town of La Conchita. This community, just north of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an ancient mudslide and has been subject to periodic massive debris flows.
La Conchita Mon Amour
Sara Tecchia Roma New York is proud to premiere La Conchita mon amour, an exhibition
featuring photography, video, digital print, net art and drawing by California-based
artist Christina McPhee.
With this new body of work, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity
between natural disaster and human trauma using the tiny coastal town of La
Conchita. This community, just north of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an
ancient mudslide and has been subject to periodic massive debris flows. The most
recent, in 2005, took ten lives and left a huge mass of fallen mountain on the town.
Yet the inhabitants continue to stay, despite the inevitable recurrence of this
threat. La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in
immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always already here. People can't or
won't leave. They can't sell their houses and place hope that the hillside can be
stabilized, though the geologic surveys suggest otherwise. Global warming appears to
be accelerating the danger.
For the past 18 months, McPhee has been visiting La Conchita, taking photographs of
the disaster's vernacular shrines to the dead on the site of the mudslide--chain
link barriers a rubble of mud, destroyed house frames, roofs, retaining walls, play
yards, swing sets and crushed cars. She also creates drawings based on the
trajectory of the debris flow, as well as taking video and performing spontaneous
personal rituals in the geography. These are all intermixed to form a visual memory
of present trauma. McPhee does not approach La Conchita as a documentarian, but
creates a new context that hovers between objective and subjective interpretation.
Artist and theorist G.H. Hovagimyan has stated that McPhee has updated the work of
Ana Mendieta into the realm of new media. "I love what Christina McPhee does," he
states. "She uses digital tools and scientific data to get to a deeply human
emotion. Philosophers say all digital media is alienating. Both Christina, like
Christophe Bruno, uses those tools to humanize."
Christina McPhee has been using the tools of new media to explore "phenomenology of
place." She has recently created the theatrical video sets for Pamela Z's
"Wunderkabinet", a multimedia opera based on stories from the Museum of Jurassic
Technology, which will have its Los Angeles premiere at the REDCAT Theatre, Walt
Disney Music Hall, October 12-15, 2006. Her media art is found in festival venues
and museums internationally since 2000, including FILE Sao Paulo, prog:me Rio de
Janeiro, Cybersonica at the ICA London, Digital Arts and Culture Melbourne,
Cornell University Electronic Media Archives, the Pandora Archive at the National
Library of Australia, Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum, the Whitney Museum
of American Art Artport, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.
Her paintings and drawings are found in American museums including the Kemper Museum
of Contemporary Art. She also has shown new videos in installation this summer at
Cartes Centre for Art and Technology, Espoo (Helsinki), Finland.
Reception: Thursday, October 19, 2006, 6 - 8pm
Sara Tecchia Roma New York
529 West 20th Street (Second floor) - New York