In my work, devotional drawings, expressive scrawls, and psychedelic color fields are embedded in shapes of translucent epoxy. Its permissiveness enables this collage-like grammar: the epoxy accepts and metabolizes any fragment, solidifies and freezes, and becomes a substrate for further painting.
I look to art histories of dream states and mystical visualization, efforts to envision the formless and to exceed the edges of the self. I materialize what it’s like to be in a separate body struggling to unite physically and psychologically with others, in the present or across gaps of time and memory.
The past provides me with distorted emblems of sacrality like baby cupids, saintly faces, and hands locked in gestures of yearning or supplication. I’m interested less in their original religious meanings than the longing they contain—I am reaching towards someone else reaching towards god. Joining another’s devotion holds an implicit desire to merge, and to pronounce the eroticism of merged subjectivities.
The bottle of my mother’s Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume that I recently found was half used when she died in 1997. If I smell it, I can conjure her, but the magic loses power with excessive repetition. Scent is visceral but extends beyond the body, invisibly, seductively, uncontrollably. The statuesque and urn-like vial is a funerary object that acts directly on memory rather than through representation. Though sensually tangible —even overpowering— the Giorgio effect is a technology of supersensory vision: the layering of sight, memory, and hallucination.
— Heather McPherson
On view: July 13 – August 31, 2024
Opening reception: Saturday July 13, 6 - 9pm
McPherson is an Associate Professor of studio art at Providence college. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from RISD. Recent shows include What Would Artist Do at a vacant storefront in Providence, Below the Thin at Take it Easy in Atlanta, and group shows at Below Grand, Kristen Lorello, and 315 Gallery in New York. She has presented previous projects with the RISD museum, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA.
