Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard

Heather McGill
The Last Time I Saw Richard
EUCLID AVENUE GALLERY
[Artist's Statement]

Heather McGill's The Last Time I Saw Richard dances across the gallery as a riotous installation of wall sculpture and air brushed painting, spinning suspended stars, and laser cut snake charmers, vultures, and the ambiguous words "I Believe." McGill's artwork, built up of layer upon layer of lacquer "candies" on various three dimensional substrates and of superimposed air brushed colored papers, surreptitiously presents layer upon layer of illusions and allusions - social, political, and physical.

On one long wall of the gallery is an 8 x 6 foot wall piece, el Farol, intricately shaped aluminum painted a strident pink and purple plaid with multiple coats of “candies,” a lacquer based automotive paint favored by hot rodders. Below the WWII bomber wing-shaped metal is a wall painting of a complex interconnected pattern of enormous pink roses, blue forget-me-nots, and discrete black silhouettes of strippers and cheerleaders, all concluding in a lantern on a chain. On the opposite wall is a grid-like arrangement of McGill’s “thinnest sculptures” of laser-cut and hand painted overlaid sheets of paper filled with intricate layers of patterning and plaids that swirl around vultures, snake charmers, and the word “Believe.” The center of the gallery is filled floor to ceiling with chains of hundreds of laser-cut and spray painted paper stars.

Heather McGill writes about her work:
My sculpture makes visual reference to automotive customizing and mass production and is predicated on understanding form as defined by light and color. I use automotive paints to finish the surfaces of my sculpture; in particular lacquer based paints called candies. Invented in the 1950's, candies are luscious, transparent colors sprayed over reflective base coats to highlight, define and optically restructure the forms they are applied to. These surfaces are meant to seduce, triggering the viewer's non-verbal, instinctive attraction to color. The candies suggest a deeper space beyond the physical surface and create complex illusions that are revealed through the viewer's different angles of observation.

Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard, 2010 Acrylic, aluminum, and lacquer; archival inkjet printed and laser cut paper; cut paper and pigment (framed) 11 ft. 6 in. x 30 ft. x 4 in. Photo: Andrew LaMoreaux Studio, courtesy of the artist

Heather McGill The Cost of Living, 2010 Cut paper and pigment 16 x 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist	Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard, 2010 (detail) Archival inkjet printed and laser cut paper; acrylic, cut paper and pigment (framed) Photo: Andrew LaMoreaux Studio, courtesy of the artist

about the artist
Heather McGill is Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Sculpture Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.. She studied at the University of California at Davis and received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984. Prior to becoming Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook, McGill taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

McGill has received grants for both permanent and temporary installations from the National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Arts Council, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. As a two-year Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, she designed a piece that became part of the permanent collection after traveling through Europe. In 1999, she received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has lectured and served as a panelist at many universities and conferences in the United States, and recently as a peer reviewer for the Fulbright Fellowship applicants in 2001-03.

A former California resident, McGill created installations throughout the West Coast exploring the historical, environmental, and cultural systems specific to each site. Outdoor permanent sculpture includes works in the city of San Rafael and for the State of California at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Sanctuary. Her work is included in the public collections of Sprint, Albright-Knox Gallery, Fidelity Investments, Compuware, Daimler, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

In the past few years, McGill has participated in group and one-person shows at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Miller/Block Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Knoedler & Company, New York, New York; L.A. Louver, Venice, California; TZ’ Art & Company, New York, New York; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain, France; Serpentine Gallery, London; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Seville Museum, Seville, Spain; William Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington; The Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin; and San Jose Museum, San Jose, California.