Neither Land Nor Water: Amy MacKay

Press Release – Neither Land Nor Water

 Opening Reception, Saturday September 19, 6-9p

la BEAST gallery is delighted to present Neither Land Nor Water, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Amy MacKay.

MacKay’s private, site-specific performances serve as a generative engine for her paintings.  Documented by multiple individuals, competing records from these events are gradually distilled into paintings via her unique logic of translation. Thin layers of oil paint trace the shape of perception and recollection across time, oscillating between representation and abstraction, presence and absence. Here memory is fluid and ever-shifting. 

Neither Land Nor Water is MacKay’s second solo exhibition with la BEAST, and second body of work based on a collaborative staging of the play By the Bog of Cats by Irish writer Marina Carr. The play is an adaptation of the myth of Medea—that ancient Greek tale of a mother’s betrayal and revenge—set in a remote Irish bog among a cast of ghosts, eclectic villagers, and a mystic in a mice-hair coat named Catwoman. Extending the play’s dance of withholding and disclosing, MacKay treats her collaborative reenactment as a living, poetic archive. Each painting becomes a threshold between seer and seen.

The oil paintings included in the exhibition telescope in scale, from miniature glimpses into MacKay’s process to sculptural panels that evoke the liminal space of a performer’s changing room. Together, they invite us into an interior field of shared fictions, conceptual and visual play, and an unfolding transformation that hovers at the edge of our grasp.

Neither Land Nor Water opens with a reception on Saturday, September 19th, from 6–9pm at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. The exhibition will remain on view through October 31st.

About the Exhibition

The word “atmosphere,” in its physical sense as the envelope of air that surrounds the Earth, dates from the late 17th century. By 1800, it had also come to mean a surrounding influence, an intangible mood we feel “in the air.” In this second felt sense, an atmosphere is everywhere, but never an object. It bathes us with in-between-ness. We are constantly exposed to atmospheres, yet our awareness is required to co-create them. 

As the theorist Gerhard Böhme notes, the art of the stage set is the production of atmosphere, simultaneously attuning the audience and performers within a “sphere of felt bodily presence.” We may produce these atmospheres, but they remain elusive. They imbue us with shades of what otherwise remains inexpressible, irrational, or irreducible.

In late 2023, MacKay staged a collaborative reenactment of the play By the Bog of Cats with the audience floating in a heated Pasadena pool. While the cast of the three-act production roamed around the grassy backyard, a cinematographer, photographers, and members of the audience documented the intimate, private event. “We’re not in the theatre,” a participant recalled, “We’re part of life here.” At sunset, red stage lights flooded the trees, their reflections glistening across inner tubes and washing over actors and audience alike.

“I think about the documentation like a drawing,” MacKay says. “It’s an armature to think through, to locate different kinds of focus.” Her previous solo show at la BEAST, To the Bog of Cats I One Day Will Return (2024), anchored each painting within the text of the play. Neither Land Nor Water expands her translation process further, rhizomatically burrowing deeper into memories of the performers and participants.

MacKay’s paintings are built through cycles of making and unmaking. She lays down veils of oil paint, and wipes them away with spirits. Clouds of white oil gesso sweep across the canvas, then get sanded back, serving as opaque screens that resist erasure and add dimensional complexity. She describes this methodical process of accumulation and unwinding as “a sincere desire to do justice to memory.” In Neither Land Nor Water, the layers expand and proliferate, sedimenting into atmospheric fields, impressions, and ghost images.

Each cycle of MacKay’s translation encodes another shift. We get hints of Medea’s twists through centuries of retelling, a whiff of the snowy bog, a glimpse of the curve of Catwoman’s coat, traces of the backstory of the actress who played her, and flashes of the audience drifting by in the changing light. Never static, they weave in ever-changing relation, expanding beyond 

mark-making into whole atmospheres, a pervasive in-between-ness that attunes these many bodies across time. In this show, the boundary between past and present, belonging and loss, is every bit as fine as her slippery layers, binding many worlds into a single field, a space that’s neither land nor water.

—Kristin Posehn

Kristin Posehn is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. She holds an MA and PhD in Sculpture from the Winchester School of Art, completed a two-year postgraduate fellowship at the Van Eyck, NL, and has taught at Oxford, Duke, and other institutions. Her work has been published in The White Review, Conjunctions, T Magazine, Flaunt, The Guardian, and many other outlets.

About the Artist
Amy MacKay (b. 1985 Sonoma, California) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Generating
work through a multi-step translation process, she stages group events, and, drawing from written,
photographic, and interview documentation, records the experience as paintings. Within this collaborative exchange, she uses translation to explore the gaps and mutations formed across a shared experience over time. Residual feelings and mutations are privileged over the recognizability of the image. It is a process that is highly physical, almost gymnastic, as additive and subtractive mark making trace her
working memory. It comes back to process; what is the interaction between past and present? And how
do images create absence?

MacKay received an MFA from UC Irvine in 2018 and a BA from Bard College, New York in 2007. She
has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as Phase Gallery, Baert Gallery and
the Honolulu Museum. She has received numerous awards, notably the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship
and Leo Freedman Fellowship.
@thisisamymackay