Testing the capacities of materials such as crystals, clay, garnet sand, and pigment blocks against forces of compression, gravity, technology, or sheer observation, Christina Mackie’s over thirty-year-long practice circumvents conceptual strategies and turns towards a meticulous investigation of the world of things and its interconnections. Often displayed in itinerant installations, her oeuvre broadens into a continuum rather than a series of insulated works. At PRAXES these connections unfolded in three parts over Autumn 2014. Combining developments in recent and upcoming work, the first installment—Drop—posited the exhibition space as a crystalline test site of material experiments still in process. The two following exhibition modules, And Bird and Frog And, took their cue from a dual monitor work from 2000, Frog and Bird, in which a frog seemingly listens to a singing blackbird.

Drop
August 30–September 28, 2014

Drop centred on Christina Mackie’s initial blueprints for a series of ten-meter, dye-drenched silk filters, exhibited at Chicago’s Renaissance Society in 2014. At PRAXES, the two white nylon maquettes were anchored by new samples of found and fabricated material indicating future processes of dipping, dyeing, coating, collecting, and molding.

And Bird
October 3–November 9, 2014

The exhibition modules And Bird and Frog And assemble existing pieces spanning Mackie’s more than thirty years of production. Taking its cue from a dual monitor work from 2000, Frog and Bird, And Bird focused on notions of performative matter and fabricated or perceived interactions, among these the stripy sculpture The Spirit of the Planet Saturn.

Frog And
November 13–December 13, 2014

Corresponding with the previous display And Bird, the third exhibition by Christina Mackie at PRAXES, Frog And, concentrated on the incidental encounter, the attuned observation, the faces in the forest. Dedicated to the early video work, Foo, this display became a universe of its own logic—one in which a homely interior contains both everyday belongings and a changing landscape weathered by a foreign system, resonating and creating (compulsive) listening for any person (or frog) reached.

Born in 1956 in England and raised in Canada before relocating to London in the 1970s, Christina Mackie has exhibited extensively with recent solo exhibitions including The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2012), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012). A monograph on her work, supported by the Contemporary Art Society, UK, will be released in 2015.