Christina Mackie
Painting the Weights
20 January–11 March 2012
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ
Chisenhale Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Christina Mackie, comprising a number of new works across sculpture, video, photography and drawing. Mackie has titled the exhibition Painting the Weights, a term used to label the process of establishing the physical make-up of an object within the field of digital animation.
For her exhibition at Chisenhale, Mackie will use the interface between scientific arguments and their virtual illustration as a way of inhabiting a number of artistic strategies. An investigation of the dislocated technologies of human interaction provides a linking theme. The framing and composition of Mackie’s works in Painting the Weights are carefully controlled to create a dense but playful set of relations between the individual artworks and the gallery space itself. Painting the Weights consistently returns to a discussion of connectivity—of the connection between societal structures and geology, the dislocation of the body to its material context and also the forces of representation that determine our understanding of the material world.
Mackie is best known for her multi-layered sculptural installations, operating as tangents and abstractions of the artist’s meditations on materiality, sculpture and the natural world, which can be emotional, physical or socio-political. Mackie uses a wide variety of sources and materials ranging from biomedical data and geological field-research to watercolour techniques and artisanal sculptural processes. The works often take the form of sculptural tableaux, extrapolated from prolonged engagement and interrogation of her chosen materials.
Painting the Weights is co-commissioned with Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and will be presented there later in 2012 with an accompanying catalogue. This publication will be Mackie’s first major monograph. Mackie is also producing a limited edition print on the occasion of her exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery.
Christina Mackie (born in Canada, 1956) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Us, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2010); The Judges, Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2010); This That and The Other, Herald Street, London (2007) and Art Now Sculpture Court, Tate Britain (2007). Mackie won the Becks Futures Art Prize in 2005 and last year received the Oxford-Melbourne Fellowship, awarded by Arts Council England and The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University. Mackie was also recently announced as the recipient of The Contemporary Art Society’s Annual Award 2011.
Chisenhale Exhibitions Partner 2012: Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
Christina Mackie’s exhibition is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.
Talks & Events
Saturday 4 February, 2pm
Pavel Pyś, Exhibitions and Displays Curator at The Henry Moore Institute, leads a tour of the exhibition.
Saturday 25 February, 2–5pm
Artist Sarah Bowker-Jones leads a free drop-in family workshop inspired by Christina Mackie’s exhibition.
All welcome, children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.
Thursday 1 March, 7pm
Phyllida Barlow, artist and Emeritus Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, in conversation with Christina Mackie.
This event is ticketed.
Tickets are are available in advance from wegottickets.com.
All events are free unless otherwise stated but booking is strongly advised. Please contact mail@chisenhale.org.uk for further information or to make a reservation.
