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The
June Kelly Gallery is pleased to open its thirty-seventh exhibition
year in the historic SoHo district of New York City with storyteller
and master multimedia artist Lisa Mackie’s personally curated
gallery installation, Rondo/India. This exhibition
brings together Mackie's distinctive artistic language with
painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture,
storytelling, and video in dramatic staging of memory and time
passage. Rondo/India will open at 166 Mercer Street on
September 6 and remain on view until October 15.
In
2020, The Josephy Center for Arts and Culture was honored to present
Lisa Mackie as their first Artist-in-Residency. The center
said Lisa Mackie is a visual artist with prodigious imagination,
known for her storytelling in provocative color, euphoric imagery,
and materials that teeter on the seemingly familiar and unfamiliar.
Her works, a compilation of picture fragments she photographed,
drew, written, and remembered, deal with a delicate balance between
cognition, process, and memory. Through her own intuitive
explanation, she meticulously traces, scrutinizes, and hones the
evolution of each image, resulting in a type of infinity.
Art
writer Lilly Wei says, “Rondo” refers to a musical form that
contains a principal theme that alternates with one or more
contrasting themes. Mackie explores the process of visual
memory, evolving imagery, and continuous motion through her journey
in India in 1999. Her prints, paintings, and installations
become narrative devices to transcend time and space and immerse
viewers into her reminiscences of her time in an enchanting new
place. Mackie invites the viewer on a sensory voyage through
an elephant ride, a boat behind the Taj Mahal, and a hike through
the Ganges (Boat at the Taj, 2023).
Wei
continues Mackie overlays and weaves together luminous pictures of
water’s drift, of its shapeshifting, literally and metaphorically,
linking it with the structure of a musical form that is, as it
states, a rondo, a round, circling. (Music is often included
in her extravagant multisensory mise-en-scènes—a cantata by
Bach, for instance, or a series of Bartók’s progressive piano
pieces). Rondo/India, in addition to water and its rhythms,
introduces associated imagistic themes as it proceeds, then returns
to depictions of water to the beginning, ready to recommence.
But the rondo’s circuit is never repetitious; the experience will
never be the same, much in the way that you cannot step into the
same river twice or see the same view twice, much as memory is never
static.
A
native of Detroit, Mackie received a BFA from the University of
Michigan and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. She
lives and works in New York City. Mackie is represented in numerous
private and corporate collections, including The Baltimore Museum of
Art, MD, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA, Brooklyn Museum, NY,
Worcester Art Museum, MA, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, The
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, NJ, Yale
University Art Gallery, CN, National Museum, Poznan, Poland, and the
Japan Trade Corporation.
Lisa
Mackie launches her latest publication, Transformational Works
(1997-2024), on September 6th at June Kelly Gallery in NYC.
Art writer Lilly Wei states, “The publication is an anthology of
Lisa Mackie’s art, an evocative, poetic gathering of nearly three
decades of remarkable projects, sectioned chronologically into
eleven episodes.”
Lilly
Wei is a New York-based art critic, art writer, journalist, and
independent curator whose area of interest is contemporary global
art.
Artist
Talk with Lisa Mackie, Saturday, September 21, 2024, 2:00 PM – 5:00
PM, at the June Kelly Gallery.
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