Amy MacKay

I make paintings based on documentation of site-specific, performative events I stage with people in my life. These experiences are structured around fictional stories (e.g. the Greek myth of Asclepius and the American folklore creature the Hidebe...

I make paintings based on documentation of site-specific, performative events I stage with people in my life. These experiences are structured around fictional stories (e.g. the Greek myth of Asclepius and the American folklore creature the Hidebehind) that have been told over and over with evolution and distortion over time. Unlike a photographic transcription, the paintings privilege feelings and affects, as source materials are abstracted past the point of recognition. Each image is made and destroyed repeatedly, so that the surface becomes a site of performed forgetting. It is a process that is highly physical, almost gymnastic, as additive and subtractive marks trace my working memory. Within this iterative exchange, I’m interested in the gaps formed across a shared experience over time. What is the interaction between past and present? And how do images create absence?