Caitlin MacBride + Shawn Powell: NADA Miami

CAITLIN MACBRIDE + SHAWN POWELL: NADA MIAMI

December 2nd – 4th, 2021

Abattoir will feature new work by Shawn Powell and Caitlin MacBride who each explore objecthood in their paintings. In this moment of socially-charged art, these artists mine figuration along singular paths towards raising the familiar into the philosophical. Both Powell and MacBride trade in objects borrowed from different realms. In the series presented here, MacBride studies tools from historical craft and museum archives, and Powell paints life preservers depicted with items one might discover in the sand. American imagery is central to both artists, who each configure carefully wrought objects into unusual environments, suggesting a conscious nod to second wave Surrealism, American still life, and Pop art traditions. MacBride studies historical tools from the Shaker community museum websites, while Powell They share a tenacious, even obsessive visual study of their subjects, delivered in a deadpan manner. The pairing of the two artists points up individual styles of painting—Powell uses acrylic, MacBride uses oil, often on wood for a layered, luminous effect.  

Shawn Powell’s recent paintings rely on iconography of beach time leisure to investigate his relationship to modern painting from 1960 onward. Several groups of work--life preservers, and beach umbrellas (overhead views)-are grounded in undisguised admiration for Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, and Daniel Buren, revisiting flatness and minimalist forms. In composing his paintings, Powell considers cinematic devices; camera angles, depth of field, and the camera's point of view. A body is referred to but remains absent. Powell’s wry sensibility emerges in how he combines the rigor of purely delineated form and color with brushy depictions of weird objects of the artist’s fascination—sandpaper, a toy soccer ball, or sausage links.  

MacBride is fascinated by tools and other historical materials from American nineteenth century culture, especially the Shaker communities of New England. The current series of still life paintings (2019 – 2021) reveals the artist’s admiration of utilitarian forms, which in her work are lifted by poetic titles and eerily weightless pictorial spaces into an unearthly state. The work examines the influence of belief systems on object making. A dedicated painter, MacBride peruses digital archives of museums in search of new subjects, considering as well the archive within her painting practice. In a most recent series, she relies on draughtsman systems of 20th century catalogues adopted by Marcel Duchamp to place her otherworldly renditions in the labor and craft context.