Amy MacKay

Amy MacKay is an artist and educator whose abstract paintings explore issues of group memory, mediation and time through the documentation of site-specific, performative events. MacKay’s practice is rooted in a multi-step translation process to create abstract paintings that act as a kind of documentation. She stages group events based on literature, and, drawing from written, photographic, and interview documentation surrounding these events, MacKay records the experiences as paintings through a rhizomatic structure of recall. “I love working collaboratively because I feel like it offers a unique way of exploring memory and the gaps formed across a shared experience over time. I’m also curious how images influence this, how they affect our relationship to what we perceive as past and present and how that affects what we think is true,” MacKay has said.

 

Working in extended projects, each body of MacKay’s work explores a different aspect of her collaborative processes and engagement with collective perception, including participants’ perspectives as well as the influence of space and environment. Her practice unfolds as “almost gymnastic,” in her words, through additive and subtractive mark-making that traces her working memory. MacKay emphasizes that she is “less interested in the recognizability of the people and places in the scene and instead try[s] to privilege residual feelings and affect. Like, how hot was it? Are those characters in love? How excited did we feel? Were we grumpy? All of the elements – the fictional narratives and physical experiences – become material that guides the formal decisions for each painting.” By privileging feelings and affects as source material, abstracted beyond the point of literal recognition, MacKay captures an embodied experience before it is pinned down by language. This layering of memory, collective experience, and affect generates a formal and visual record of events, emphasizing the traces of lived experience rather than representational detail. MacKay’s work moves through repeated stages of research, staging, and translation, where image and performance chase one another in a regenerative, embodied cycle of transformation.

 

Amy MacKay is an artist and educator who was born in Sonoma County in 1985. She received her BA in Painting from Bard College in 2007. After graduating, MacKay taught in an education non-profit in San Francisco for five years. After moving moving to Los Angeles in 2012, she returned to school to receive her MFA at UC Irvine (2015). MacKay’s solo exhibitions include those at la BEAST, Los Angeles, CA; Phase Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Art Center, UC Irvine, CA; Group Therapy, Los Angeles, CA; SHED Project Space, Oakland, CA; and Bluxome Point, San Francisco, CA, among others. Her work has been featured in solo group exhibitions include those at Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; la BEAST, Los Angeles, CA; Lobster Club, Los Angeles, CA; OCC Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Costa Mesa, CA; OCC Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Costa Mesa, CA; and Chandler Gallery, Mill Valley, CA. She has also participated in New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Art Fair (Miami, FL) and the Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles, CA) with la BEAST. She has received numerous awards, notably the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship and Leo Freedman Fellowship. MacKay is also one of the founders of the after-hours gallery in Downtown Los Angeles and the arts initiative Group Practice. Today, MacKay lives and works in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Santa Monica College.