#nancyannemcphee

Nancy Anne McPhee -- Fragment 47

Redhead Gallery, Toronto  -- November 1 to 25, 2017

by Karen Thiessen

During a November weekend, I popped by Nancy Anne McPhee’s exhibition Fragment 47 at Redhead Gallery in Toronto. I spent some time with the work and then went on my way to Type Books, where I bought musician Patti Smith’s newest book Devotion. Before bed, I read half of it. That night Smith’s words and McPhee’s photographs merged into one continuous dream. When I awoke, I knew that I had to write about McPhee’s work. Later, while I was writing this essay, I learned that this phenomenon was an afterglow (1) effect, when an artwork stays with you even if it didn’t have that much impact during your first encounter. Although this has happened to me before, these delayed attractions take me by surprise when they arrive without warning.

Still under the influence of my Smith/McPhee dream, I returned to the gallery. Fragment 47 and Mineralogy were dynamic contrasts in light, mood, and scale. Fragment 47, a 12 by 8 foot installation of the silhouette of an oak tree buffeted by wind, dominated one long wall in a darkened space. The oak was created with anaglypta, an embossed paintable wallpaper, in acanthus leaf and bark patterns. Both wall and tree were painted the same rich dark blue gloss and illuminated with a 4 foot fluorescent light positioned at the base of the tree.

The title of this installation, Fragment 47, comes from part of a poem by Sappho, a female Greek lyric poet, most of whose work is lost. It reads: “Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.” (2) In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about “the blue of distance” that relates to landscapes (horizons and far away mountain ridges) and time: “The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.”(3) McPhee used deep blue and stark light to convey the loss of poetry, the distant mountain whose wind shook the oak, and the distant past when Sappho wrote of love. Eerie fluorescent light accentuated the heavy texture of the wallpaper and bounced off the gloss paint in this dark space thus creating an unsettling psychological tension of menace and melancholy.

In an adjacent section of the L-shaped gallery was Mineralogy: five images of gleaming minerals photographed against doppelgänger textile backdrops. The 18 by 24 inch images, mounted on aluminum and thus unencumbered by glass and frames, appeared to float on three well-lit white walls. Each artwork was given ample space to breathe, and this had the effect of a palate cleanser between food courses. McPhee photographed selenite, pink halite, sandstone, pyrite, and bismuth against textiles that mirrored the colour, texture, and sheen of each lustrous mineral. With the exception of two minerals, most were photographed against fabrics that were flat. The textiles suggestively draped around the pyrite and bismuth brought to mind sultry nude models photographed on artfully arranged satin sheets. Like Patti Smith’s memoirs, the overall atmosphere was serene, warm, inviting, and dreamy. As Smith wrote in Devotion: “In my sleep genius combines, regenerates,” that night in my dreams of her Devotion and Nancy Anne McPhee’s Mineralogy, my subconscious mind linked the two. (4) To read Patti Smith, whether M Train or Devotion, is to enter into a poetic and reverent world of rituals, dreams, and mundane objects made sacred through her venerable care.

The minerals on which McPhee focussed her lens, are small, beautiful, yet common, substances found unnoticed or invisible in most homes. Selenite, a form of gypsum, is in drywall; bismuth is used in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics; halite, or sodium chloride, is the gourmet salt of the moment. McPhee takes these ubiquitous minerals and amplifies their humble status by juxtaposing them against glittering backgrounds.

Patti Smith, a dream, and the afterglow effect led me to write about Nancy Anne McPhee’s exhibition. The sprawling, sombre, monochromatic Fragment 47 installation offered contrast to McPhee’s intimate, ethereal, colourful Mineralogy. My dream after my first viewing of McPhee’s exhibit was lustrous and shimmering, like the selenite and pink halite against their sparkly backgrounds. Patti Smith repeated one word to me throughout the night, but upon awakening it was gone, just like much of Sappho’s poetry.

Karen Thiessen is a textile and mixed-media artist. She maintains a virtual presence at www.karenthiessen.com and on Instagram via @dayindayoutstudio.

Notes: 

1.Thanks to Catherine Leroux for this term found in: Porter, Rosalind. ‘Canadian writers are bold!’ The Globe and Mail. Saturday November 4, 2017, p. R18.

2.Nancy Anne McPhee artist statement.

3.  Solnit, Rebecca. ‘The Blue of Distance.’ A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 39.

4. Patti Smith. Devotion. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 13.