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Nashville Scene, May 19 - 25, 2005
Disparities: Works by Robert Durham and Carrie McGee
Cumberland Gallery
by David Maddox

Metro Pulse, April 17-23, 2003
Artists Once or Now Among Us
A Century of Progress, Twentieth Century Painting in Tennessee
Knoxville Museum of Art
by Heather Joyner

"…Nashville resident McGee also serves to remind us that there's far more to Tennessee art than scenes of Cades Cove. In her construction titled "Conversion" (2001), she has suspended painted - or otherwise treated - clear plastic blocks along wires hung inches from the gallery wall. "Conversion" is as much about space, reflected color, and transparency as it is about overall form. It seems to transcend time period or culture and is, quite simply, breathtaking."

Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Summer 2002
A Century of Progress: Twentieth Century Painting in Tennessee.
by Terri Smith

Carrie McGee began her art career using traditional paint media and supports to create large-scale abstract expressionist paintings. In the past several years, however, McGee's work has become as much about sculpture as it is about paint. Her materials have expanded beyond canvas and paint to also include Plexiglas, metal wire, rust, and resin. McGee describes these disparate elements as part of her new vocabulary that includes "process, transparency, found materials, chance and play."

Transparency is a vital quality in McGee's work. Rather than applying paint, rust, and other pigments to the surface of her pieces - like one would apply paint to a canvas - McGee actually paints, rubs, and stamps color onto the backs of transparent objects. By placing a layer of plastic (sometimes thin Plexiglas and sometimes thick block) between the viewer and the abstract compositions she renders, McGee feels the translucent barrier between viewer and viewed is metaphorical. "The layered visual climate," she remarked at the Cumberland Gallery exhibition + Four, 2000, "speaks about interior life, time passage and memory. In it I explore visually the contradictory nature of impulses to expose and conceal, to draw in and to distance."

By hanging Conversion several inches from the wall, light has the room to resonate - to not only enter from the front, but to reflect back to the viewer as it bounces off the white wall. While abstract painters like Mark Rothko varied pigment hues to create the illusion of light shining through the back of canvas, McGee uses existing architecture and light to create this affect. The shadows created by the translucent boxes of color add texture to the piece, giving Conversion what is essentially a compositional subplot or a secondary composition that complements and intrigues.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, McGee moved to Nashville from New York in 1993. Since receiving her B.A. from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, she has exhibited in over twenty-five exhibitions across the United States. McGee has also received a Southern Arts Federation Fellowship and was the Internationale Austausch Ateliers Basel Exchange Artist, Christoph Merian Foundation, Basel, Switzerland in 1997.

Atlanta Journal Constitution, 9 June 2000
Emotional Intensity from Resin and Rust
Lowe Gallery
by Jerry Cullum

Resin and rust are sometimes the materials of contemporary sculpture, but Carrie McGee has mastered them as a material for painting as well. Her mixtures of rust, acrylic resin block and oil pigments create pieces that range from the sculptural "Curtain" series to Mark Rothko-like rectangles of contrasting shades of color.

The transparent plastic body of the work allows for luminosity that proves quite haunting in the "Lozenge" series, in which a central space of semi-transparency is surrounded by a solid white area defined by stained linen.

This Nashville-based artist considers her use of rust to be multimetaphoric, with the trace of metal laid down by soaking her materials in water analogous to the operation of memory. This is, however, as irrelevant to the sensuous impact of the work as are the elemental references in "Curtain (Air)" and "Curtain (Earth)," neither of which depends on associations with airiness or earthiness for its success. Metal clasps connect semi-transparent squares in which a good many things are going on, but it is the formal quality of balance and energy that carries the pieces, rather than their starting points.

McGee's versatility creates surface and depth effects that give the viewer a lot of emotional room for private associations. Offering subdued but startling juxtapositions, her work alternates between intimacy and dramatic scale in ways that invite personal intensity.

Art Papers, March/April 2000
Plus Four, Cumberland Gallery
by Terri Smith

" In a world of slick and often pixilated surfaces that convey the virtual reality beneath--the movie, web site or video game--content often takes a front seat to the means of delivery. For the artists in "Plus Four" … surface is a primary player in their content.

…Carrie McGee's abstract constructions of Plexiglas and canvas in "+Four" appear at first glance to be solely about surface and composition--a hearkening to her beginnings as an abstract painter. Upon closer inspection, however, McGee's objects, with pieces of whitewashed canvas that are ripped and burnt at the edges, possess a visceral quality not found in minimalism. While McGee's form is her content, the passage of time is referenced through the use of rust that is produced by laying metal objects on the interior of the Plexiglas box until a silhouette of rust is imprinted. Through this process McGee transforms familiar objects into ethereal abstractions reminiscent of a Man Ray Rayograph."

Art Papers, November/December 1999
Rust Never Speaks
by Susan Knowles

In Nashville for just over five years, Carrie McGee has not only made her artistic mark, but, in a very real sense, represents the first of a wave of artists who are coming here to roost regardless of job and gallery market, and whose works are becoming permeated with both the grit and glamour of this town. Her work might best be described as Arte Povera meets the "School of Nashville," as materials are of paramount importance to McGee, who relies on formal elements such as rust stained Plexiglas, burned cloth and paper, canvas, wood frames and hardware to create both design and texture in her work. While other elements, such as snapshots, found paper, and cloth are combined to add intimations of personal revelation, experimentation with process and an instinctively elegant design style are what dominate and ultimately determine the direction of each piece.
Nashville is not yet, by anyone's estimation, on the mainline track for an art world career, but it's becoming a good holding place. The oft-touted parallels between visual artists and musicians definitely apply; the proverbial wisdom is that Nashville musicians need to go to Austin to get recognized and should dare to return only once the record contract is signed. By the same token, the most effective way for a visual artist to attract the attention of Nashville collectors and art dealers is to get a gallery in another burgeoning art center, such as Memphis or Atlanta (New York, Chicago and Santa Fe work equally well), and return a hometown hero.

McGee, who moved to Nashville from New York in 1993 for a partner's musical ambition, once despaired for her art career; she transported works to Memphis' Bell-Ross Gallery, while starting a business painting photographic backdrops. Fortunately, her arrival coincided with the rise of a bona-fide local art scene. Getting involved with the newly-formed Visual Artists Alliance of Nashville, she began to show in group shows at Nashville's public not-for-profit spaces, and soon McGee encountered the "School of Nashville," a loosely affiliated nexus of a few commercial photographers doing edgy personal work and several visual artists just hitting their stride.

Late 20th-century American and European artists have been drawn to the leavings of industry, and Nashville artists are no exception. The empty warehouses where they find studio space often sit beside little used railroad tracks, and abandoned buildings and scrap yards often provide an abundance of cheap (sometimes free) raw materials. So it's no surprise that the signs and symbols, as well as physical detritus, of post-industrial society can be found in the works of contemporary artists from Atlanta to Chicago and Cleveland to San Francisco. But added to that heady mix in Nashville during the 1980s and early 1990s was a group of young freelance photographers making pretty good money working in the music business. The commercial (and personal) work of Larry Dixon (a successful photographer who left Nashville, went to the University of Florida to study under pioneer innovator Jerry Uelsman, and returned to inject his surrealistic imagery into the commercial bloodstream) set the tone here. Others include Empire Studio's Scott Bonner and Ron Keith, with their hazy 1930-ish portrait style employing visible layers of film, Peter Nash, whose blurred and distorted experimental shots of Lyle Lovett exactly captured the twisted and cynical tone of his first album, and Mark Tucker, whose rough and rugged color and black and white shots are often combined into David Hockney-meets-Robert Rauschenberg like assemblages. The blurred black and white or sepia images created by experimental camera technique, the careless-seeming use of color, either garish or very subdued, the film-like quality, and, often, pronounced sexual overtones--all of these characterize the very vibrant and seductive Nashville photo scene of the 1980s. Visual artists including the bold figurative painter Kathryn Schoepflin and photographer John Folsom came along at the tail-end of the 1980s; the works of both, already impregnated with a post-industrial aura, took on the smudgy appearance and shadowy visual properties of altered photographs.

McGee, who arrived on the scene soon thereafter, was doing rust stain paintings on cloth and assemblages of cotton or scrim, sometimes with body parts printed upon them, stretched over frames with thread and wire. She soon began using small square frosted glass blocks that she had found stacked in an abandoned factory space on the outskirts of downtown Nashville, producing rusted impressions on them and later combining them with faded photos so obscured as to be almost unreadable. The photographic images became a stand-in for text in pieces that also employed blackboard-like surfaces. Cy Twombly-like erasures on the black surfaces, and photos dimly seen through cloudy windows, tied in, for McGee, to issues surrounding absence, confusion and loss. The use of the discarded cast glass blocks soon led McGee to explore the wide world of plastics and she began to use Plexiglas, with rust as both stain and pigment, as primary medium.

A six by four foot Plexiglas curtain that she made in 1996 was a breakthrough piece. Constructed from thin squares of rust-tinted plexi bound together at all four corners, it hung suspended eight inches in front of a pure white wall. The shadows of objects--hardware, chain link, found metal objects--that had been rusted directly onto the plexi melded with the shadows made by the curtain on the wall behind. That shadowy space became McGee's focus over the next several years. In 1997, McGee won both a Southern Arts Federation Fellowship and a Cristoph Merrian (Basel) Fellowship, which took her to Switzerland for eight months. While there she began a series of square four-inch deep box-like forms employing grids of plexi squares, both opaque and rust stained, that focused on the study of the space behind. She began wrapping canvas, lifted from the covering of worktable surface, around the box forms, cutting or burning openings for the plexi pieces to create windows onto that space, which she describes as "interior climate." Her latest works, collectively titled "Page," are a series of boxes (now beginning to vary in shape from the familiar squares) wrapped in gessoed canvas that still bears the marks and texture of her work surface, and revealing a plexi surface behind which can be seen white space, sometimes obscured by etching clear or using milky-finish Plexiglas.

The book-like format sets up an intentional dualism--text and its absence--for McGee, who senses that the fascinating space behind the page might be a metaphor for the psyche, where language elements float without narrative structure. An unfinished piece in her studio is a tall and narrow box measuring six feet by one foot, with irregular burned cloth openings at top and bottom that reveal, below, an amber colored window and above, the sightless view into an opaque fog. It's like confronting the silence--a human form that holds memory and knowledge but reveals neither.

National Endowment for the Arts/Southern Arts Federation
1996 Fellowships Catalogue, 1997
Carrie McGee
by Susan W Knowles

Those languorous moments that slow time to a standstill - moments of complete intimacy or mindless preoccupation, those moments when one is intensely alive, when every fiber of one's being is occupied - are Carrie McGee's inspiration. Often, they are the memories of childhood, entrusted as it is with first time encounters with nature... one's own body... animals.., other people. Alongside such embedded "sense memories" are one's intellectualizations of them. McGee is interested in looking at what makes up sensual, even erotic, perception, and what accompanying mental associations form, and what choices they predict, in adult life.

McGee's paintings concern materials; her processes carry symbolic weight. The warm brown-red of rust, used as a pigment or stained onto an impermeable surface, is the linking aesthetic. Rust stains on plastic blocks, or streaks of rust laid down with a brush onto whitewashed wood surfaces or painted onto handmade paper, set an overall tone: time passed, blood dried. Faded photographs of a parent and child, or an adolescent woman (young mother or pubescent daughter) are barely visible behind a swath of paint on a shadowbox surface. Photo fragments recur several times in the same assemblage, as if to suggest the unstoppability of memory. The physical making of the piece mimics both experience and ways of thinking. Objects are put into place and then removed, leaving holes when one's instinct is to cover them. Marks are made and then eradicated, calling to mind the discomfiture of expression, the hesitance to expose one's self, in the form of a visual signature, to view.

By resurrecting her own poetic memories and referencing them in this work, McGee has begun an exploration of the past that brings crucial information to bear on her present. On the one hand McGee finds herself wanting to have a life without a past, by creating instead a desirable world, a world with its own language, into which one can enter and never return, like the mysterious scenarios of Joseph Cornell, the in vented psychological language of Eva Hesse, and the apolitical societies of Milan Kundera. On the other hand, she cannot resist plumbing the depths of her own fragmented history.

In some ways McGee's paintings seem more like constructions whose painted elements and use of pigments, especially those made from rust, govern their composition. By screen printing onto a rust-stained block, or attaching something to its verso that can barely be discerned from the front and seems to be embedded in the block, McGee is able to conjure the properties of amber, which preserves insects or fossils once it hardens from the liquid state. The works carry a feeling of slow suspension, stopping viewers in their tracks and pulling them into their own world of reverie. The quiet earth tones and blurred edges of McGee's painted and stained surfaces possess a serious beauty all their own. Some of the pieces have elegantly messy Jasper Johns-like drips, others recall Arte Povera in their references to discarded industrial materials. As Paul Gauguin put it to Paul Serusier in the early days of Post-Impressionism, a painting should be "emotion recollected in tranquility." McGee's works move through and beyond those prophetic words, evoking the rare moments when emotions heighten and the imagination crystallizes around them.

Art Papers, November/December 1996
Carrie McGee
by Susan W. Knowles

This luminous exhibit, in a single gallery at Cheekwood Museum of Art, was one of this year's finest in Nashville, and a high point of the museum's year long "Temporary Contemporary" series of solo exhibits by local artists. Carrie McGee's works have long been concerned with "traces", in the form of stains, wear and tear, and other physical evidence of the passage of time. Up to now she has rendered those traces by virtue of faded linen and muslin, often stitched and sewn; collaged elements such as fruit paper wrappings and can labels: stains left by rusted objects: and hand and footprints.

For the past year or so, McGee has been concerned with rendering rust stain "shadows" onto Plexiglas. In this exhibit, the wall facing viewers entering the gallery was devoted to a carefully arranged grouping of rust pieces. The "ghosts" of tools and other potentially rustable metal objects, in transparent reddish brown on blocks of dense plastic, or on thin Plexiglas squares, had been assembled into sculptural ensembles, hung free floating in front of white wooden planks mounted on the wall. In the center, joined together with brass "staples", was a rectangular curtain suspended about 4" from the wall. The hardware (always visible) with which McGee attaches her plastic blocks to wood, or her thin Plexiglas squares to each other, is a carefully chosen part of the composition. Here, the rust color against the gallery's white walls and sand-colored carpet glowed warm and earth-bound, with touches of brilliant cobalt, hot pink and bright green adding notes of startling passion to the muted tone of the whole.

Displayed on the other walls of the gallery was a new series of works that represent a breakthrough for McGee. The pieces are not only more visibly personal, but also include carefully planned "sketch/collages" that reveal something of her working process. Here McGee is using old photographs, most of them partially obscured or in shadow, and what look at first glance like found objects--wooden balls and toy blocks--to create a series of box constructions. The boxes are divided into compartments closed off with opaque or partially transparent glass or Plexiglas, sometimes covering a photograph or an object, or open and empty, or holding an object. McGee forces viewers to look closely, in order to see the photographs behind daubs of paint on top of glass covers, in order to read typewriter letters on tiny scraps of paper in her preparatory sketch-collages, in order to analyze what appear to be specimen-like samples on petrie dish lids. The act of peering intently mimics the artist's quest for understanding her own inner life, which she reveals to us as fragments of memory from childhood, some of which are obscured from our (and her own) view.

The boxes, in her words, are a way to make tangible the 'feeling tone" of adult life, the "contradictory nature of impulses to expose and conceal, to draw in and to distance." The black and white snapshots she uses, of a young child with a parent, or of a youthful young woman-- offhand, casual records of a time of unselfconscious happiness--become in retrospect documents of a "profound childhood experience of loss and fragmentation". Again a nine square box with the title spelled out at upper right in plaster casts from actual toy blocks, contains a photo of a house in its center block and a photo of a child whose parent has been obliterated from view in the upper left corner block. A broken plaster square in the lower right corner that has been tied together with crude copper wire is a poignant reminder of how many of our earliest childhood experiences result in permanent fractures of the soul. Always A Part the largest piece in the show, is not a box, but contains elements of the boxes as well as references to the trace/history/memory of the rust pieces. A group of plastic, rust-stained, squares forms a vertical band across the top and there is a slate-like dark gray surface below in the shape of a large rectangle. The glow of lined up rust squares suggests a sunset, placed as it on upon a horizon line. But the color of rust can also bring to mind faded bloodstains, a suggestion of painful times past. The dark rectangle below, which reminds us of a chalkboard that has been erased many times, seems to represent before, or after, a place of dark obscurity. Under the rusted Plexiglas squares one can just make out two photographs, both the same image of a parent and child, with different parts blocked out. This work is the thematic center of the exhibit, titled as it is to suggest both inclusion and exclusion--forevermore. On the blackboard, painted blocks of wood are mounted here and there, and empty pairs of holes reveal former presences. Drips and chalk marks on this geometric suggestion of a grid call attention to the surface but also suggest atmosphere, depth of space, fog, clouds--a fuzzy memory, feelings that may yet be unknowable.

The separations of parent from child, either by divorce, death, war, drug or alcohol habits, or other circumstance, and the faded memory of a time when everyone was together and all seemed whole, are themes running through many of the pieces. Concepts such as self and other, revealing and concealing, inside and outside--as they relate to the secret life of emotional identity--are delicately explored. A wooden (plaster cast) ball inside a deep whitewashed box about the size of a shoebox, entitled Sphere seems so lonely that it mocks the concept of wholeness so often suggested by the form of the globe. Plaster blocks spelling Lost stand up close to the front window of a similar box whose back wall is a rust square. We wonder what experiences are hidden behind this clouded curtain of the past. Elegant, meditative and melancholy, these pieces, with their carefully crafted plainness and somberly beautiful palette are cool with emotional distance and quiet as a sleeping baby. In their inescapable forthrightness, they carry along a barely whispered vulnerability filled with dignified authority.

Art Papers, March 1994
Art on the Edge, Concrete Spaces Gallery
by David Ribar

".... Carrie McGee's visual sensibility is that of a poet's - a poet of the diminutive and the accidental, of the transparent stain and the sensual layer. Her works are mixed media constructions of plastic sheets nailed over large wood shadow boxes, executed with precision and taste. The pigments and colorations on these plastic sheets and those inside the box forms are the result of oxidation, decay, and dispersion of a variety of media, including rust, and invoke many natural, chemical processes. They also recall the complex, layered feeling for composition and media that imbues Joseph Cornell's best works with a metaphysical import. McGee's hazy, discolored plastic films even function like Cornell's glass sheets; each forms a barrier over the contents behind it, permitting visual access while denying physical entry. McGee has often used her own fingerprints and footprints as floating surface marks in her work, balancing the more abstract elements of design with her personal presence. Here, a variety of such marks, along with vague prints from her own body, mingle like wispy clouds among a sky of ambiguous design elements. Despite the inherent humbleness of her materials, or perhaps because of them, McGee's constructions caress the eye and prompt a multitude of delectable allusions in the mind, without self-consciousness, or the burdens of rhetoric."

IDEA, no. 232, 1992, Japan
Series 30-I: Art in New York Today
Carrie McGee: Washing Off the Scale of Culture
by Shoichiro Higuchi

Although some of Carrie McGee's work is on canvas, almost all of it is based on rust. At the bottom of a huge vat, she places a sheet of transparent vinyl or fiberglass, fills the vat with water and chemicals and then adds iron scraps that she has collected. She lets it sit, and over the course of some weeks or months, the rust falls off in the form of powder or flakes, creating a residue on the sheet. Released from its duties of strength and purpose, the iron returns to its original shape. The process seems to express the freedom and bewilderment one feels when liberated from the restrictions and framework of society. The rusty residue is like scales of culture, shed for us to examine, and the vinyl or fiberglass sheet is like a projection screen for their presentation. Carrie McGee speeds up the rusting process, and viewers match their own personal time frames to that. The shades and patterns formed by the rust evoke the uncanny feeling in people that this kind of freedom and liberation is also akin to dissolving and vanishing altogether.