Heather Leigh McPherson

Painting professor Heather Leigh McPherson makes paintings and objects with colorful poured paint and epoxy that render even the roughest sketches with digital smoothness. Smoky textures cross through the picture plane, unsettling the surface. Translucent, chemical substances combine with found objects, textiles, and delicate paper drawings. Within the drawings, facial features accompany expressive fragments—scrawls, text, and cartoons—that function as self-surrogates. This collage-like grammar underscores the indeterminacy that attends expression, desire, and communication as a whole.

In this exhibition, McPherson forgoes paintings on canvas altogether. The works on view consist of translucent hanging reliefs comprised of stained chiffon and drawings on spiral-bound notepads embedded in clear epoxy. Through their viscous and tactile materials, the compositions convey a sense of vulnerability and intimate personal expression. With titles like Soft Sword, Bupropion and High Bottom, earlier works refer to antidepressant medications or terms for diagnosing alcohol addiction, drawing attention to how the health industry often defines social identity through mental illness, particularly for women. Newer works, such as Penny and Mash, seem to trap within the amber-like epoxy substance the crooked smiles and curlicues of McPherson’s earlier paintings alongside tokens of McPherson’s current world.

Traditional paradigms of serial form and consistent color palette feature prominently in McPherson’s artwork, as do associations to myriad art historical, cinematic, and other cultural sources references. With pastels and milky hues pooling into strange forms, the artwork is in dialogue with painters and color enthusiasts across time and space. More obvious connections tie her work to generationally diverse American artists, ranging from Helen Frankenthaler and Elizabeth Murray to Dona Nelson and Carrie Moyer. Her experiments with materiality and format link the most recent pieces to non-painters, even conceptual artists like Ragen Moss and Anika Yi. These relationships demonstrate how McPherson deftly moves in and out of abstract and found art lineages without conforming to any singular, and therefore limited, context.

1. Helen Frankenthaler, Cravat, 1973 Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 59 inches2. Ragen Moss, Untitled (Site, Object, Structure), 2016 Polychromed plastic, 40 x 40 x 15 inches3. Heather Leigh McPherson, Soft Sword, 2017 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas

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