Untitled Art Miami Beach: Shona McAndrew & Kiwha Lee

CHART is pleased to present new work by painters Shona McAndrew and Kiwha Lee to be exhibited at Untitled Art December 6-10. Both artists fuse personal and familiar narratives with elements from art history, melding past and present into fascinating studies of life as contemporary female art makers, and highlighting aspects of lives that too often go unnoticed or are underrepresented.

McAndrew is renowned for her intimate portraits depicting women in their personal spaces, disrupting art historical conventions of the female nude by revealing personal and authentic representations of women. Informed by her experiences as a plus-sized woman, of body dysmorphia and struggles with societal expectations of womanhood, McAndrew imagines her figures as allies in various states of reveal, unembarrassed by their often exposed bodies, and seemingly unaware and unconcerned about the viewer's voyeurism. By positioning these women within the broader art historical context, she subverts traditional objectifications of feminity employed by male artists through history.

Having lived and worked around the globe, Lee's densely-patterned abstractions reflect the artist's own multi-layered identity. Seeing painting as "a construct born of cultural imagination," Lee decentralizes European modes of pictorial composition and linear perspective, and instead embraces Chinese and Korean landscape painting and rich patterning to create a sense of spatial depth. Pattern becomes a metaphor for the rich textures and subtle nuances of our own lives while also veiling or drawing attention to shared space. Lee breaks down distinctions between barriers of perception, emphasizing that the body's experience in space is inherently interactive with its environment, never still, forever inseparable between body and vision.

RESPONDING TO MATERIAL TRANSLATIONS OF THE WORLD

Responding to a need she feels for a material translation of our world, unfixed and filled with patterns and vibrations, Lee expresses a desire to transgress artificial and arbitrary boundaries. She re-imagines "a more real representation" of what it feels like in the world today by using pattern as a potent narrative tool of abstraction. Lee uses her own original comparative framework: Instead of the illusory glass window through which we've learned to see and understand through hundreds of years of oil painting, she employs the architectual and ornamental stone lattice structure, or jali, through which the world enters from the back of the painting. Affecting the very space of the viewer in its stead, colored light pouring in from the external world is more akin to stained glass. These works exemplify Lee's search for a new way to approach abstraction, informed by art history yet also drawing from overlooked histories rooted in objects and architecture, subverting both the history and hierarchy of painting.