Christina McPhee at Sara Tecchia

Dear Friends,
This is perhaps the most innovative and exciting new media exhibition in New York City this Fall. If you see no other show see this one. It's really worth it. As a bonus I am doing a conversation with Christina on November 16th. Here's the info:

Exhibition:

La Conchita Mon Amour
Christina McPhee

Dates: October 19 thru November 22, 2006

Reception: October 19, 2006
6-8pm

ARTIST TALK:
Thursday, November 16, 2006, 6:30pm
"Trauma and Performance in New Media Documentary"
Christina McPhee in conversation with GH Hovagimyan

Sara Tecchia Roma New York is proud to premiere La Conchita mon amour, an exhibition featuring photography, HD video, digital print, and drawing by California-based artist Christina McPhee.

With this new body of work, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity between natural disaster and human trauma at the tiny coastal town of La Conchita, California. This community, just north of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an ancient mudslide and has been subject to periodic massive debris flows. The most recent, in 2005, took ten lives and left a huge mass of fallen mountain on the town. Yet the inhabitants must continue to stay, despite the inevitable recurrence of this threat. La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always already here. Global warming appears to be accelerating the danger. Without resources for healing or leaving, La Conchita lives on in abandonment. The plight of residents at La Conchita is a microcosm of the conditions of bare life in post-911 material culture.

For the past year at one month intervals, the artist has shot medium format and digital photographs of the disaster's vernacular shrines to the dead on the site of the mudslide—chain link barriers a rubble of mud, destroyed house frames, roofs, retaining walls, play yards, swing sets and crushed cars. She has recorded video and audio in these site visits at quiet times of the day, developing a time-based record of the cyclical power of the tides, the freeway sounds, and the voices of residents who would sometimes guide her into precarious parts of the ruin. Her working methods perform an intimate and subtle connection to the architectural conditions of the site, which also give rise to graphite and ink study drawings of the threat of debris flow. The drawings are repetitive and performative as if to retrace the edges of that which cannot be visualized. Given the impossibility of representing trauma, McPhee's images reach through obsessive layers of visual data towards an integration beyond the material facts of the site. The large-scale images that result from this process are topologies of absence and recovery. Like the prayer flags they record, the images are performance gestures, signaling an attempt to remain in touch with hope and life in the face of indifference.

Videos for the exhibition were produced in part through a residency at the Experimental Television Center, New York, in November 2005. A related interactive narrative on La Conchita will be featured online at New York's Turbulence.org beginning in early October.

Artist and theorist G.H. Hovagimyan has stated that McPhee has updated the work of Ana Mendieta into the realm of new media. "I love what Christina McPhee does," he states. "She uses digital tools and scientific data to get to a deeply human emotion. Some philosophers say all digital media is alienating. Christina, like Christophe Bruno, uses those tools to humanize."

Christina McPhee's photography, drawing and time based arts explore the phenomenology of place. She has recently created theatrical video for Pamela Z's "Wunderkabinet", an opera based on stories from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, opening this month at REDCAT Theatre, Walt Disney Music Hall, Los Angeles. Her media art has shown at FILE Sao Paulo, prog:me Rio de Janeiro, ICA /Cybersonica; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; and is in the collections of Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of Electronic Media Art, 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. Her multichannel video installation "Carrizo Diaries" on seismic memory was shown this summer (2006) at the Cartes Centre for Art and Technology, Espoo (Helsinki), Finland with support from the American Scandinavian Foundation.




SARA TECCHIA ROMA NEW YORK is located at 529 West 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue. The gallery is on the second floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For more information, contact 212-741-2900, or visit www.saratecchia.com