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.