Amy MacKay

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My paintings document site-specific, performative events I stage with people in my life. These gatherings — whether a devised play or a séance — are built around shared fictions: myths, rituals, and stories that have been told and retold over time, often centering voices and characters that have been displaced or lost completely. Through collective participation, these narratives reach across multiple sites of experience, forming a network of gestures, memories and affects that shift and mutate with every retelling. In the studio, painting becomes a shared origin and destination: the event is constructed in service of the image, and the image in service of the event. Each surface becomes a scene or distilled moment shaped by both narrative structure and the embodied experiences of participants. Composition, line, and color follow an affective logic — one that holds multiple subjectivities simultaneously rather than a single authorial voice. My body is always the interlocutor, the gesture imagined through the eyes of others, becoming a sign for multiple spaces at once. The process is physical and layered, with images made and unmade in cycles that trace acts of remembering and forgetting. It is precisely the impossibility of creating a "true" account of such a complex set of experiences that makes painting compelling as a form of document. I employ abstraction as a means to preserve the distance between the image and the experience, bringing attention to the way...

Artwork