Peter Clothier

Kim McCarty
"Inside-Out"
Works on Paper Gallery, Los Angeles
August-September 1998
Kim McCarty's early paintings, suggestive of stills taken from moody, enigmatic scenes from film noir movies, were distinctive for their clear reference to the narrative progression of the film reel itself, and its multiple, grid-like succession of images. When she made the move from the hard surfaces of those early paintings to the softer, more absorbent surface of paper and from oil to watercolor, she stayed with the grid to assure structural integrity for the ever-growing profusion of images that tumbled out onto the paper. As she gained confidence with the medium, however, she began to permit the grid to literally deconstruct, allowing each segment to find its own dimensions and placement, slipping out into new arrangements of varying shape and density.

Since her primary thematic focus remained the human body, the grid soon began to reformulate in new patterns, suggestive of the skeletal structure or the internal organs-the liver, or the heart. This new approach invited McCarty to slip between the interstices of the individual elements, finding a unique way to explore the hidden physiological depths of being human, and by extension its psychological and emotional depths as well. Confronted with this impressive series of works on paper, the viewer becomes the voyeur of an interior, private landscape of images and obsessions, pain and pleasure, eros and thanatos.

In her most recent paintings, McCarty explores these discoveries in still greater depth and complexity. Barely recognizable here, the grid balloons out into large areas of image or narrative, with generous spaces left as bold passages of silence in between. Changed, too, is the palette-ranging from deep browns to bright oranges and yellows-newly assertive in its boldness. And, adding a rich texture of social and historical reference to McCarty's vocabulary of images, a whole new range of borrowings from art history is introduced, creating a bass-line subtext to reflect and amplify the lyrical melodies of the artist's intensely private musings on the vulnerability of the human experience.

---Peter Clothier has written numerous non-fiction and fiction publications, poetry, articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.