Heather McPherson Grasps at Loss, Memory, and Dreams at the Distillery Gallery

Dreams can create alluring yet fickle worlds. Difficult to make sense of when we are awake, their logic is clear when we are within these self-constructed realms. Though we may disagree about what they mean, they are containers for memories both fresh and deeply buried. Peering into Heather McPherson’s paintings and drawings on view in “Giorgio” at the Distillery Gallery feels like gazing into excerpts from a dream journal—one in which the artist muddies the boundaries between hallucination and vision. McPherson summons the very personal memory of her late mother, represented by the titular bottle of Giorgio perfume, fusing it with distorted saintly faces plucked from tomes on Western art history and other excerpts gathered. Engaging with this work requires letting go of the literal and wading into someone else’s dream world.

The works on view cover the last four years of McPherson’s practice. Rather than being arranged by date or medium, they are uniformly hung at eye level, acting as small portals. McPherson revisits symbols and motifs in multiple media, creating a dialogue that synchronizes the various techniques she uses to achieve the desired effect. The show’s namesake bottle appears in the more recent drawings on paper from this year. In Cathexis Butterfly (2024), for example, McPherson diligently reproduces the perfume bottle’s sumptuous form in graphite, layering it with abstract fields of chartreuse and teal watercolor. Scribbled butterflies surround the bottles of Giorgio, their jagged forms in stark contrast to the smooth lines of the bottles. The frenetic energy of the linework mingles with the mottled, nebulous watercolors, meeting in the dark space between the two bottles that pulls everything in like a black hole. 

This energy, which gives the impression that the artist awoke after a particularly jarring dream and transcribed the feeling to paper, is repeated in other drawings, like 8 Giorgio mozzarella (2024) and Giorgio (2024). Giorgio, in particular, begets a playful dream-like quality. Look closely to see the mysterious bottle of perfume flanked by two butterflies. As with Cathexis Butterfly, the bottle’s realistic rendering lends a sort of “eye of the storm” calm within a frame full of abstract lines. But stand back and squint a little, and a face emerges. Now, the bottle is a nose, the butterflies loosely stand in for eyes, and the U-shaped traces of their movement resemble a very round chin and cheeks. 

If McPherson’s drawings can be seen as dream narratives, the epoxy works can be understood as preserved memories. The artist submerges paintings and drawings on paper in epoxy, at times adding other objects such as painted chiffon, and continues the layering by painting on top of this new stratified canvas. A work like Five Holes from 2020, the earliest and largest of the collection at twenty-two by twenty-eight inches, is a notable precursor to the works on paper. The frayed edge of a sketchbook page—a motif McPherson draws in a meta moment in High Bottom II (2024)—floats within a watermelon-candy-toned epoxy. Contained within it is an abstracted scene that echoes the layers and nuance of the newer works. Rather than create clear distinctions between media, McPherson has transferred and evolved this energy so that the relationship between the epoxy paintings and works on paper is undeniable. While they may not be siblings, they are certainly from the same family.

Faces—particularly of religious figures—appear throughout the works like visions from a fever dream. There are references sampled from traditional European painting (perhaps Golden Age Dutch or Italian Renaissance?) as well as saintly faces. McPherson refers to these as “distorted emblems of sacrality,” poetically noting she is not interested in their original meanings but rather the ideas they contain as symbols of devotion: “I am reaching towards someone else reaching towards god,” she writes in her text. Like a sample of one song in another, they are meant to evoke a feeling or a quick impression rather than reference a particular art history. Beneath the ribbon-like lines of paint in Cupid (2023–2024), McPherson has suspended a miniscule drawing of an expressive figure bent over folded hands. It’s a small detail, but a treat to discover among the layers of paint and paper. Elsewhere in the orange-hued, K-shaped epoxy painting is another scrap of frayed sketchbook, on top of which float two cartoon smiley faces that may or may not be stickers. These smiley faces appear throughout the exhibition, walking the line between playful and mocking depending on the context. Notably sited on top of the epoxy is a black-and-white image of a woman and child—or a cupid, as the title suggests—though the image is so tightly cropped, it is difficult to discern their exact relationship. 

McPherson experiments with the representation of faces, lending them a surrealist quality. In Coming and Going Away (2024), an epoxy painting cheekily located next to a graphite version of her epoxy paintings titled No No No (2024), as well as Sparkling Threshold (2024), cupid-like visages melt and warp into tear-drop shapes. They float mid-swirl atop their resin canvases, as if the artist applied them through a dropper. These smaller epoxy paintings explore the territory between dream state and hallucination, creating a captivating visual language of her own design.

For all the faces in “Giorgio,” one we don’t see is that of McPherson’s mother. Instead, scent, so closely tied with memory, is referred to repeatedly throughout the exhibition: McPherson examines its power in her exhibition text, noting she can “conjure” her mother if she smells the half-used bottle from the nineties, but that “the magic loses power with excessive repetition.” In the pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition checklist, writer Tess Brown-Lavoie also responds to this phenomenon, musing that her grandfather’s discontinued perfume “evokes the deep expression i call up without a name inside a world of death in synchronous dialectic with life.” While at first the repeated references to scent seem to fall a little flat in an exhibition of visual work, they ultimately make sense. Even if we could smell the fragrance, it will never have the artist’s desired effect. What we are given is an imprint, a feeling, that McPherson transcribed in the language she knows best. In exploring loss, memory, and attachment through a personal lens, McPherson—and Brown-Lavoie—nudge us to conjure our own ghosts and visions, whether they are of a person, place, or moment in time. 

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“Heather McPherson: Giorgio” is on view at the Distillery Gallery through August 31, 2024.