Christina McPhee
Feast Day
March 9 - April 21, 2024
Who gathers by the bonfire? Who’s waiting for an invite? A feast is growing in numbers, and floating above the fire, a milky smudge of vermillion smokes, a drift of saints alive. Feasting is everything we were good at: strategies of survival and surfeit have led, at last, to this. Arriving from above and below, the paintings move from tiny relics to gigantic fields where stigmata, like salamanders, hunt for Saint Francis. Mike Kelley leads in a high school parade at Judson Church. Fifteenth-century Mary Magdalene super heroines convene in a huddle. Dive-bombing Mothra fixates her sights on Saint Lucy, her eyes on a plate. Sam Cooke sings on the hem of a garment ‘and I shall be healed.’ Around Valentine’s Day, a crowd anoints trans activist Gentili: they shout in the cathedral, ‘Saint Cecilia!’ Our Lady of Mount Carmel strolls like a girl on a summer’s night in North Brooklyn, slipping her hand along the tablecloth. Feast of/on what? On whom? For whom? These are questions, quests and transgressions that the paintings explore, transforming Left Field into a hot box of wonder.
