Artist Statement

Skyler McGee paints to locate herself. Location is not only an established place; it is also a network of relationships to be traversed and negotiated. To live somewhere, especially to create a sense of home, requires living with and through relationships to the soil, to birds and feral cats, to canned soup and shower curtains, to neighbors, strangers, streets, and sunlight.

Working in and across multiple mediums, her work belongs on the borders. She explores the spaces between disciplines, between materials, and between environments, depicting places where relationships cannot be assumed but must be crafted, developed, and sustained in all their threatening and beautiful complexity.

Rocks, insects, and flora meet unrecognizable forms, abstracted landscapes, and objects from other settings. The interplay between the forms and colors are neither serene nor aggressive. Rather, the work inhabits the experienced space of possibility, the spaces and spacing in between chaos and stillness, the settings before and after, in which we may live towards a home. The artwork maps our personal and communal lives as they unfold in the midst of ecological, cultural, and communal transformations.

Trained in oil painting and mixed-media work, she draws from the Abstract Expressionists and Post-Impressionists, employing domestic imagery as well as gesture and ornament. Across and through the various mediums, she probes the fissures—openings and wounds—that mark our efforts to find or craft some understanding and experience that this life and this world can be, also, a home for us.