[spectre] McPhee : CARTES in Finland

[Louise Desrenards]

http://www.cartes-art.fi/mcphee/

http://www.cartes-art.fi/mcphee/index_english.html



 From 9th May to 5th September 2006, CARTES Centre for Art and
Technology presents a video retrospective installation at WeeGee,
Tapiola, Finland, together with the debut of two new films, by
multimedia artist Christina McPhee (US).

"As in a dream, the camera in media artist Christina McPhee's video..
roams across an enigmatic landscape gathering disparate images that
tangle together as loosely twisted threads of a story. They never
fully knit together, but that's the point. Her themes are memory,
trauma and the tumult of earthquakes, and the video functions as a
dreamscape of layered and moving frames that mimic the way slips of
imagery flutter through our psyche, one quickly replaced by another..."
Holly Willis, "Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries," LA Weekly, March 2005

The current geologic epoch is sometimes called 'anthropocene' to
emphasize the force of human-induced ecological and geologic changes.
In response to the global crisis of climate change and environmental
risk, contemporary media art moves across the liminal edges of
landscapes, linking human perceptions with natural forces, in a
cybernetic embrace. Along the San Andreas Fault in California,
Christina McPhee explores topologies of memory, trauma and geologic
presence, like a field guide in a psychogeographic landscape. She
tracks seismic presence through intimate studies of site. Combining
performance and documentary, her experimental films meditate on the
hidden and invisible forces of seismicity, and the shock of
unpredictable trauma. Her topologic site studies hauntingly combine
the poetics of memory with flashes of documentary and performance.
Her work lives at the strange crossroads of scientific visualization
and imaginative narrative in new media.

Christina McPhee's recent videos have shown this year in installation
at Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden http://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/
exhibit05.html and screened at the Pacific Film Archive, University
of California, Berkeley, for the centennial of the San Francisco
earthquake and great fire of 1906 http://firstpulseprojects.net/
Strange-Weather-mt/seismic-activity/. Her new work in video
installation and digital large format photography, "La Conchita mon
amour' will open at Sara Tecchia Roma New York in October 2006. She
created video installation for Pamela Z¹s ³Wunderkabinet², a
multimedia opera based on stories from the Museum of Jurassic
Technology (Los Angeles) in debut at the LAB, San Francisco in 2005.
She collaborates with the cyberfeminist collective thealit.de for an
installation of Naxsmash, on traumatic memory and disappearance at
the Hochschule for Median Kunst Koln in 2007. Her films, digital
print installations and net art have shown in festival venues and
museums internationally since 2000, including FILE Sao Paulo, prog:me
Rio de Janeiro, Cybersonica at the ICA London, Digital Arts and
Culture Melbourne, and the Royal Academy Copenhagen. Cornell
University Electronic Media Archives, the Pandora Archive at the
National Library of Australia, the Whitney Museum of American Art
Artport, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.
Her paintings and drawings are found in American museums including
the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.


Christina's videos are presented courtesy the artist and Sara Tecchia
Roma New York  http://www.saratecchia.com

The artist's websites are http://strikeslip.tv, http://
christinamcphee.net and http://naxsmash.net


The exhibition is curated by Maria Tjader-Knight, Director, Cartes
director at cartes-art.fi


The exhibition is sponsored in part by the American Scandinavian
Foundation N.Y. http://amscan.org/