COPENHAGEN.- Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents the first exhibition in Scandinavia by the Canadian artist Christina Mackie. The exhibition, entitled Painting the Weights, consists of an extraordinary installation that features such diverse elements as watercolours, photographs and ceramics, as well as found materials that range from mineral specimens to plastic beer crates. The exhibition follows Mackie’s ongoing fascination with both human technologies and natural materials, and her exploration of the connections that run between people, societies and the natural world.
Mackie’s exhibition is conceived as a single installation in two main parts. In the first galleries a host of found and crafted objects is arranged on makeshift tables and shelves, reflecting the artist’s studio environment. This sequence follows a principle of repetition and morphosis that runs through Mackie’s work as a whole. For example, the various forms in the ink drawings hung in the first space are reflected in the image of a mushroom cloud, which in turn is echoed by the shape of a jellyfish. Moreover, two videos featured in the first room are repeated in the second, one displayed in 3D and one bounced off a mirror, thus playing out other possible dimensions of the work.
The second part of the exhibition, on display in the last gallery, is entitled Us, the Residents. It contains a calligraphy of steel bars, a structure that supports photographs depicting solitary figures looking at computer screens in high-rise apartment buildings. The images, in one of which the artist herself appears, allude to the virtual connections between apparently isolated individuals.
Raised in Canada, Mackie (1956) lives and works in London. Her 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; she is a current recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award – a three year production grant that the artist was awarded in 2010; and in 2011 she received an Oxford-Melbourne Fellowship, awarded by Arts Council England and The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Chisenhale Gallery, London, where it was shown earlier this year. It is supported by The Danish Arts Council’s Committee for International Visual Arts. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, available from June 2012, price 40 kr.
