
Boxed:Shift
2021 – Oil/alkyd on panel – 30″ x 10″ – $1800
Saundra McPherson
Studio 403
My work is shaped by a lifetime exploring wild places and abandoned urban landscapes. Growing up in rural northern California with trails, fields, and creeks at my door, and a feral imagination, I wandered in unfettered freedom.
A similar freedom guides my studio practice, working intuitively and driven by exploration, chance, and the physical characteristics of pigments and mediums. My process entails building a history of surfaces, forces, and materials over time, working between what I feel and what I know.
I moved during the pandemic from a home with a garden to a hyper-urban apartment. My immediate environment shifted from leafy green shelter to the light on the bay and the buildings surrounding me.
The shift to high-urban shelter, between high-rise buildings and rooftops, found its way to my work. Stacked boxes juxtapose color and the light of water and sky. Boxed:shift references our collective feeling of locked-in and looking out. During the 2020 pandemic, the world shifted to living inside, gazing at walls and out windows. We have adapted as we wait, watch, and shelter.
Juxtaposing color is what I know. Painting clean-edged lines free-hand has been a shift in process that echoes my experience of the past year: control outside of the lines, freedom within them.