Marcelyn McNeil: Good Day Bad Day

Marcelyn McNeil Good Day Bad Day John M. O’Quinn Gallery Lawndale Art & Performance Center Oct 10, 2020 - Jan 16, 2021

Marcelyn McNeil Good Day Bad Day John M. O’Quinn Gallery

In Good Day Bad Day, Marcelyn McNeil responds to the formidable architecture of Lawndale’s John M. O’Quinn Gallery through site-specific abstract paintings and sculptures. Through her experimental approach to painting and process, McNeil challenges traditional assumptions about abstraction to produce works that remind us of the lyrical power of painting in an ever challenging contemporary moment.

Q&A with Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at The Dallas Museum of Art, forthcoming.

Marcelyn McNeil holds a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown widely across the United States—including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas—in commercial, non-profit, university, and museum spaces. Within Texas, McNeil has exhibited in multiple biennials and at San Antonio Art Museum, Galveston Arts Center, Lawndale Art and Performance Center (Houston), Conduit Gallery (Dallas), and others. From 2012-14, McNeil taught painting at the University of Houston as visiting artist faculty. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, 100 W Corsicana, and MacDowell Colony. Additional awards include the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, Zeta Orionis Fellowship, Purchase Award (The Portland Art Museum), and Community Arts Assistance Program Grant (The City of Chicago); additionally, McNeil has been a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant nominee.

Anna Katherine Brodbeck is the Hoffman Family senior curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Since joining the DMA in 2017, Brodbeck has curated numerous exhibitions, including the survey exhibition Jonas Wood (2019); the thematic exhibitions For a Dreamer of Houses (2020); America Will Be!: Surveying the Contemporary Landscape (2019); and focus exhibitions of Sandra Cinto, Ragnar Kjartansson, Alex Katz, Wanda Koop, the Guerrilla Girls, Runo Lagomarsino, Yayoi Kusama, and Minerva Cuevas. She was the venue curator of Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty (2018) and Laura Owens (2018); and co-curated Truth: 24 frames per second (2018). In summer 2021, she will present Concentrations 63: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole at the DMA. Prior to joining the DMA, she worked in the curatorial departments at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Frick Collection, New York. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary art.

Marcelyn McNeil Good Day Bad Day Exhibition Checklist

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01. Paint it Black, Series, 2020

Oil on burlap

23 x 19”

07. Feedback, Right Side, 2020

Oil on canvas

72 x 66”

02. Introvert, 2020

Oil on canvas

72 x 66”

08. Feedback, Left Side, 2020

Oil on canvas

72 x 66”

03. Thin Line, 2020

Oil on canvas

72 x 66”

09. Post and Beam, Rouge, 2020

Oil on canvas

128 x 20 x 26”

04. Gray Area, 2020

Oil on canvas

66 x 72”

10. Post and Beam, Blush, 2020

Oil on canvas

128 x 20 x 26”

05. Blue Hour, 2020

Black light, UV paint, and spike tape

Dimensions variable

11. Post and Beam, Chartreuse, 2020

Oil on canvas

128 x 20 x 26”

06. Soak, 2020

Oil on canvas

50 x 48”

12. Faux Footer, 2020

Cast hydrocal

33 x 19”

Marcelyn McNeil Good Day Bad Day Essay by Katherine Brodbeck

Marcelyn McNeil’s show Good Day Bad Day unfolds gradually over time. When first entering Lawndale’s John M. O’Quinn Gallery after encountering a small-scale work on the title wall, about a third of the exhibition appears in your field of vision. But the parts you see elicit the whole. They seem to point to their counterparts hidden behind columns or encroaching in your peripheral vision: the backs of canvases, or the edges of rhyming shapes pulling you towards them.

The show has a certain choreography, a clear sign of the artist’s deep knowledge of the space and her creation of these works with its idiosyncrasies in mind. This most clearly apparent in her engagement of the gallery’s central columns. There, she has placed 11 feet tall elongated trapezoidal paintings, where her mastery of the pour technique is most evident. The colors are bright and joyous. Chartreuse, orange, and pink. They somehow both illustrate and resist gravity, the former effect reinforced by how the canvases are propped up against the column at a slight angle, getting wider at the bottom, mimicking the journey of the pour onto the canvas. However, the paint doesn’t quite reach the top or the bottom of the canvas, giving them a buoyant feel. Only one is visible when you walk in the room; the others are placed at other extremes, framing smaller sections of the exhibition that greet you almost with surprise when you encounter them.

When I met McNeil in her Dallas studio as she was preparing for the show, her first statement about the exhibition was that she wanted these bright colors in the center of the space, while the works on the framing walls would consist primarily of whites, blacks, and greys. There are five equally-sized rectangular canvases, and a sixth slightly smaller painting, distributed on these walls, in pairs or alone. McNeil uses raw canvas, and this grants these works an organicity that softens their more restricted palette. Moreover, when looking closely at the works, the palette doesn’t feel all that restricted. You can still see the phantom hues of the colors that lie underneath the layers of paint that form the foreground of the composition, a process she described to me as building things up only to cover them to get to their essence. The foreground shapes are irregular; they bend and bow and subtly undulate.

McNeil prepared for the show by taking detailed measurements of the space and rolling out paper the length of the columns to use as a to-scale representations back in her studio.

I imagined her in the very physical process of making those calculations, an internalization of the form that echoes the just over life-sized format of her rectangular canvases that envelope and hug the viewer without overwhelming.

When I saw McNeil during installation, she had placed every canvas but was still experimenting. She was finalizing a sculpture on the fourth column, a series of stacked cast plaster rectangles abutted by semi-circles interlocked with log cabin joinery, where the pieces don’t meet flush at the edge. It’s a form that’s also found in Amish quilt traditions, and she spoke with reverence of how these craft traditions preceded the use of similar motifs in Modernism. It also reminded me of the relationship between the edges of many of the forms within her rectangular paintings which don’t quite meet the edges of the canvas.

McNeil was also playing with the scale of a triangle of fluorescent paint illuminated with a black light in a dark corner of the space. She wanted to soften the light there to make the space feel calm and to play with the phenomenological effects that have energized theories of abstraction since the 1950s and 1960s. The triangle seemed to call over to the triangles built up from layers upon layers of paint across the room. But, in contrast, this triangle was quite literally light which disappears completely when the lamp is turned off, an antidote, perhaps, to the heaviness we all feel, and its ultimate transience.

McNeil’s experiments with fluorescent paint and even her column sculpture had transformed significantly since I saw her last. Then, she was playing around with putting the plaster casts directly on the floor, making a diagrammatic form to mimic the 6 feet we had to keep from one another during the pandemic. Indeed, the socio-political environment of the pandemic was weighing heavily on her mind at that moment; it is the context of the creation of the works. Good day, bad day. When I saw McNeil installing the work, she admitted that I had seen her last on a bad day. For me, too, I silently admitted. Both of us were struggling through our creative and professional charges when there was so much pain all around and inside us. But as the title promises, these feelings come in waves, echoing the subtly undulating forms of the paintings. The underlayers of color still present, just barely visible like old scars, but part of the rich tapestry of our lived experience. Indeed, McNeil’s work unfolds over time.

Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time.

About Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances.

Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston.

Supporters Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Anchorage Foundation of Texas; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham; The John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation; Houston Endowment; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/ Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

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