Alissa McKendrick

Electric Guitar Players

March 13 - April 17, 2021

de boer gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition and limited edition publication of new paintings by Alissa McKendrick. In McKendrick’s first exhibition with de boer, New York based McKendrick presents a collection of paintings depicting female guitarists.

McKendrick composes enigmatic, semi-narrative scenes against fields of emotive color. Her pictures hover between whimsy and the macabre, merging playful daydreams with nightmares. A lightness of painterly touch and stylistic playfulness bely her vaguely ominous subject matter. While never quite sinister, the fantastical scenes always contain a hint of nefarious magic. Her musicians - who all play unplugged electric guitars - perform songs to enchant the likes of skeletons, witches, and mermaids. Fantasy and absurdity, as well as a certain visual precariousness, barely obscure these paintings’ heavy symbolism and emotional realities.

The compositions and structural relationships create a complex relational sum. In one large painting, a frail skeleton is seen from behind, laying in a wispily rendered dark blue field. Although the skeleton’s posture appears to be one of repose, its torso, propped up by its arms, is strangely alert. It stares at a distant group of skyscrapers; meanwhile, a small female figure, positioned between the foreground figure and the far-off cityscape, clutches an electric guitar, serenading or even necromancing the subject - as well as the viewer. The playful reference to Andrew Wyeth creates a quasi-narrative Edwardian gothic episode. Like Wyeth’s painting, which he titled Christina’s World (1948), the painting is more a psychological landscape than a pictorial one, a portrayal of a state of mind, rather than a real or imagined place. 

There is a reserve and quiet confidence to McKendrick’s paintings, which let viewers question and oscillate between their own positions of identification: are we the conjuring musicians, or their bewitched audiences? 

Alissa McKendrick (b. 1984) attended Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. She has had solo exhibitions at Collaborations, Copenhagen, Denmark; Team Gallery, New York, NY; Real Fine Arts; Brooklyn, NY. Group exhibitions include; Galerie Crévecoeur, Paris, France; 68 Projects, Berlin, Germany; White Columns, New York, NY; Alex Zachary, New York, NY; Greene Naftali, New York, NY; Y2K Group, New York, NY; and Mercy Pictures, Auckland, New Zealand.

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