Tricia Keightley & Caitlin MacBride: Deborah Remington

September 8th - October 30th, 2021

Installation Views

Artworks

Press Release

Heroes Gallery is pleased to present the work of two contemporary painters, Tricia Keightley and Caitlin MacBride, in conversation with Deborah Remington’s Davos, 1975. Both Keightley and MacBride consider Remington to be a fore-bearer to their work.

A central, glowing shape appears like an emblem from a gradient background in Deborah Remington’s 1975 lithograph Davos. Emblem is an appropriate word for Remington’s forms, its definition being a heraldic device or symbolic object that is a distinctive badge of a nation, organization, or family. It reflects her muscled seriousness, her ironclad skill as a painter and her use of abstraction to portray the powerful, the grand and the battle-worn body. Unlike the calligraphy she studied in Japan in the late 1950s, her emblems are removed from a particular, readable meaning but full of implied symbolism. They are banners carried in an unknown conflict.

Caitlin MacBride combs through museum collections for objects that imply a particular function. Shaker tools, empty articles of clothing, weaving shuttles and pieces of rope; all point to a particular purpose or use. But when pictured alone, floating eerily on peach and purple backgrounds, they begin to unhitch from their specificity. Something once so particular, a device or implement that one imagines holding in the hand, abstracts into a formal and often diagrammatic composition. The result is slightly haunting, like a village workshop left abandoned by its inhabitants in a rush and discovered decades later undisturbed.

Tricia Keightley builds improvised machines in their purest sense, each an apparatus implying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function that together perform a particular task. However, in her world there is no function and no task, only a personal vocabulary of endless counterweights, levers, rivets and hinges, all carefully chosen to prevent any particular narrative from forming in the viewer. Keightley refers to her practice as mechanical abstraction, a formal exercise that leans on our familiarity with scientific illustrations, diagrams, patent submissions and the endless prototypes of our technical world. But we’re surprised to realize that something so mechanical is actually handmade, Keightley’s quiet labor adds a layer of touch and humanity to her machines.

Caitlin MacBride is a painter based in Hudson, New York. She received her MFA in painting at Bard College in 2015 and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. MacBride has been awarded the Salzburg Summer Akademy program (2010), the Lighthouse Works residency (2015), the Offshore Residency (2017) and attended Vermont Studio Center (2009). She has had solo shows at Real Fine Arts (2009) and Chapter NY (2015) and two-person exhibitions at Jack Barrett Gallery (2018) and Fisher Parrish Gallery (2020).

Tricia Keightley is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. After studies at Parsons School of Design, she received her B.F.A. in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute in 1990. Keightley was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (2002), a MacDowell Colony Residency (2010), a Millay Colony Residency (2016) and was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority Arts for Transit program to create a permanent piece at the Hunters Point Avenue #7 Subway station in Long Island City (2012). She’s had a two-person exhibition at Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2018), and solo exhibitions at Tripod Space Projects, Busan, South Korea (2018), Galerie Schuster, Frankfurt, Germany (2007) and Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY (1999).

Deborah Remington (1930-2010) was born and grew up in Haddonfield, NJ, the first cousin twice removed of American West painter Frederic Remington. At a young age she attended classes at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts and moved to Pasadena, CA when she was 14. In 1955, she received her BFA from the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed San Francisco Art Institute) where she studied under Clyfford Still and Elmer Bischoff. Art critic Dore Ashton once described the Institute during those years as “one of the few postwar art schools in which a spirit of rebellion infused both teachers and students.” Remington engrained herself into the Bay Area Beat scene.

By 1954, Remington was one of six painters and poets, and the only woman, who founded the now legendary 6 Gallery in San Francisco. Famous for exhibiting experimental artwork and poetry, it was the venue in which Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in public on October 7, 1955. Remington spent two years traveling and living in Japan, Cambodia, and Nepal. While in Japan she studied classical and contemporary calligraphy, an influence that can be seen in her later works. She earned money working odd jobs, including as a cook, translator, and actress doing bit parts in television and B-grade movies, returning to the United Stated in 1958.

Upon return, Remington had three solo shows at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco (in 1962, 1963, and 1965) and one at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1964. But by 1965 Remington had grown restless and moved to New York City working with the Bykert Gallery in New York on solo shows in 1967, 1969, 1972, and 1974. She lived in Paris for a short stint from 1967 until 1968, and had the inaugural show at Galerie Darthea Speyer in 1968. This exhibition introduced her work to Europe.

A retrospective exhibition of Remington’s work, curated by Paul Schimmel, was held at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, CA in 1983 (now Orange County Museum of Art), and traveled to the Oakland Museum of Art. Schimmel describes her work as having “the particular California orientation toward super saturated colors that have a luminescent, ethereal and vibrant quality. . . Remington went on to develop highly personal, visually charged painting containing some of the concerns of spiritual art.” In her own words, she said “I am concerned with expressing an intense and personal vision through an imagery which is particularly my own. While I do not completely understand the sources of this imagery, my work contains elements, which by simultaneously attracting and repelling one another, create a tense balance which has emotional and spiritual meaning for me.”

Remington was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Tamarind Fellowship (in 1975 where she produced the print below). Her work can be found in museums throughout the United States and Europe including: The Art Institute of Chicago (Illinois), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France). Her oral history was recorded by the Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institute.

Remington died April 21, 2010 in Moorestown, New Jersey of cancer, at the age of 79.