Medrie MacPhee was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and has resided in New York City since 1976. She received a B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
MacPhee’s earlier work can be divided into distinct bodies such as The Industrial Series, The Floating World, Future Species. Architecture served as a metaphor in describing a psychological and historical response to crisis and repair. Her visual representations were built on construction, momentum, collapse and renewal — adding up to a distinct sensation of being up against an unnamable reality.
More recently, her work has gone through a substantial shift. The use of ordinary materials — clothing with its attendant buttons, zippers, seams, decorative details collaged to the entire surface of canvas, has changed the conversation. Although the paintings are non-depictive, the identifiable “real” things in combination with the painted surfaces have created something fresh and elusive.
MacPhee relates the collaged elements of clothing to the idea of creating a visual “matrix”. An arena of play where the “real” doesn’t overwhelm the imagined and verbal/visual language is malleable. The pauses and gaps, the symbiotic relationship between the present and absent, the subterranean level of feeling and instinct that lies under words, and the force of their undertow are reflected in the new works.
MacPhee is a recipient of American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize Awards, a Pollock-Krasner Award, an Anonymous Was a Woman grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Grants, the Elizabeth Greenshields Award, and Canada Council Established-Artist Grants. She has been a resident at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Bau Institute of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the American Academy in Rome, and Flying Horse Editions, Orlando, Florida, which produced a limited edition of her prints. She received a public art commission from Cadillac Fairview to execute a major painting for the Main Tower of the Mies van der Rohe TD Center in Toronto for 2015.
