Heather McPherson ~ shack, shanty, flat
Opening reception: Saturday, January 14, 7-10pm
*Performance by Muleskinner MacQueen at the reception.*
Get This! Gallery is pleased to present Atlanta-based artist Heather McPherson’s solo exhibition, “shack, shanty, flat”. This is the McPherson’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The work featured in the exhibition, embodies the southern vernacular so comforting to us all, whether you’re from the South or not.
McPherson’s most recent body of work is a multidisciplinary look at houses – all hardscrabble and distinctly southern – and the possibility of learning something about their inhabitants through exterior clues. This is a continual focus in McPherson’s work. She writes of the work, “Each house has an attribute that becomes the focus and gives us clues about the houses’ inhabitants; sheets hanging on a porch, a pile of logs, a boarded up window, an old car parked in front. In these drawings, as in life, everything is not perfect. Time passes, erodes the paint on a wall, rots the wood on a porch, but there’s beauty and truth in these imperfections. These drawing are of the everyday, the beauty of the passage of time and of people living.”
Heather McPherson was born in Atlanta, Ga., in 1980. She graduated from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2005 with a degree in painting and a minor in printmaking. As a child she rode to Pennsylvania on an Amtrak train every summer. She often spent the night looking at houses in unknown towns, trying to imagine what the occupants of those houses were doing and what their lives were like. Those early experiences have informed her explorations of houses and people, and the loose narratives we can gain from the exteriors of where we live.