Medrie MacPhee at Baldacci Daverio - exhibition of paintings; New York, New York 
Art in America , July, 1993 by Ken Johnson.

In certain ways, the recent paintings by Medrie MacPhee are dramatically different from those she exhibited in her three previous New York solo shows. In earlier works MacPhee, a Canadian-born New Yorker, focused on the industrial wasteland: God-forsaken factories, bridges, piers and other structures. These she depicted in a painterly style that evoked Hopper-like melancholy and de Chiricoesque mystery.In her new paintings, MacPhee has turned away from specific description and toward an allusive mix of abstraction and representation. These voluptuously painted, mostly medium-size pictures suggest illuminated but murky submarine places; in them, what seems a species of aquatic plant life fills the space with vertically rising tendrils and oval pod or leaf forms. Different as it is, however, the new work is not unrelated to the old. In some of the industrial pictures, a weird, watery atmosphere and fantastically elaborated ductwork and plumbing prefigure the new paintings' oceanic ambience and vegetation. And MacPhee's involvement in light, illusory space, dreamy moods and the sensuous physicality of paint is as strong as ever. Several of the recent paintings create the illusion of looking through a kind of underwater forest that is illuminated from beyond by diffused sunlight. The Music of Spheres is typical: in the foreground, thin, elongated stems punctuated by disks like lily-pads extend in irregular parallels from the bottom to the top of the canvas. These are silhouetted against the back- ground light, and bright highlights at the edges give them a tubular dimensionality. Further back, these forms fade and become flattened into ghostly gray and purple lines and blotches. In the far distance, things dissolve into a dusky haze tinted with yellow, orange and red. There is a degree of impressionistic naturalism about this, but what is more strongly projected is an otherworldly numinous quality. In several other paintings, the dominant background color is blue rather than yellow, making for a cooler and somewhat more mysterious submarine feeling. In two canvases another figure is added to the plant forms: a bulky shell-like object shaped a bit like a tire. It could be some kind of strange mollusk, pod or carved stone. In Timpano, three of these unidentifiable forms are floating behind the foreground screen of vines. Less successful are a couple of paintings in which the viney plants are replaced by flattened ribbon like forms dangling from pulleys. In Arythmia, these are located in a schematically defined architectural space, which suggests they are derived from a factory setting. There's a literalism about the belt-and-pulley imagery that makes the paintings less magically evocative than the plant and shell pictures. In MacPhee's best paintings, it is the combination of imaginal vision, formal complexity and luxurious painterly sensuality that makes them work so well.