Nashville Scene, May 19 - 25, 2005 Disparities: Works by Robert Durham and Carrie McGeeCumberland Gallery by David Maddox “To create her paintings, McGee lays translucent acrylic sheets in a bath of water and binder and puts metal objects on the sheets that react with the water to leave rust outlines and stains she doesn't entirely control. She adds oil paint to build up grids of circles and ovals. The thin oil paint has a similar density and flow to the rust, so it forms a similar residue on the acrylic. She marks both sides of the sheets, and most of the pieces cast shadows on the gallery wall, giving her three surfaces to work with. Color and shape progress through the grids and patterns, sometimes making a clear movement from lightness to heaviness or shifting between dominant hues. The variations in density, shape and color create distinct emotional tones within a seemingly limited abstract vocabulary.
The central body of work here is a series called "Iterations," each of which is based on a single sheet of acrylic held in a metal frame. The show also includes works with multiple pieces held together by rods or wire laid out in grids or strands. The mechanics of the fixtures are always visible and contrast with the delicate transitions of the pigments. "Iterations 10" consists of a 5-by-5 grid of ovals with circles inside. The figures are densely and uniformly packed, as if a relentless biological growth were filling the space, giving the piece a sense of heaviness and foreboding. In contrast, "Iterations 8" has a 7-by-5 grid of circles of different sizes, less heavily delineated, with more space between them. The lighter density of markings gives individual colors more room to register, and McGee breaks up the regularity of the grid. This frees the figures to dance on the surface, and the piece captures the inherent lightness of her translucent painting surface and thin pigments. McGee's works carry the evidence of the process that made them: the rust is immediately identifiable as rust, and most people will associate it with the way rust forms and with the settings of industrial or domestic decay where we encounter it. But hers is not a literal, one-to-one appropriation of process into the work, such as a piece that incorporates a live plant or a mechanical contraption. Instead, she conjures…when she turns rust and a few dabs of paint into abstract patterns that can evoke human emotions. The rust itself has no emotional life and only incidental human content until the painter-magician breathes on it.”
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