Blue McRight

Quench

JANUARY 12 - FEBRUARY 23, 2013

Presented as Samuel Freeman Gallery on La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles.

Blue McRight
Quench
January 12 - February 23, 2013

Samuel Freeman is pleased to announce Quench, a solo exhibition of new work by Blue McRight.  This is the artist’s 7th solo exhibition with the gallery, dating back to its beginnings as Asher/Faure, and her first at the gallery’s new location.  The installation will combine mixed media sculpture with small paintings and drawings.

The elements of this exhibition take water and its historically rich arc of mythologies, rituals, economies, and fears as a primary source of exploration.  At the center of the installation is a colony of all-black, intricately threaded objects that forcibly bind collected natural ephemera (trees, branches, driftwood) with various hardwares of water distribution (vintage sprinklers, hoses, nozzles).   Whether referencing totemic objects of fetish and ritual or presaging future decayed archeological artifacts, these new hybrid objects—both seamless and preternaturally awkward—join disparate elements into rare sculptural combines that alluringly invoke both humor and the sublime.

Continuing her ongoing psycho-cultural narrative, McRight’s newest iteration of works on paper draws upon the seafaring archetypes of siren and mermaid.   Casually dressed in a fitted orange sheath dress and clearly bipedal, McRight’s mermaid-like figure is depicted in physical and psychological isolation, amidst, within, and of the water.  Whether spewing water like a hose, hovering above the ocean, or calmly napping on a couch out to sea, the uncannily painted scenes and their solitary protagonist present a visual essay, of sorts, on the siren’s dilemma—caught between the binaries of culture-nature, power-compassion, and resignation-desire.