I’m Just As Strange As You: The Frida Series
2012 / 2022
Joe McGee
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” – Frida Kahlo
Quappi Projects is pleased to present Joe McGee’s I’m Just As Strange As You: The Frida Series 2012-2022, opening June 17 and closing July 23. McGee’s work was included in our autumn 2020 exhibition We All Declare For Liberty: 2020 and the Future of American Citizenship; this is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Charged with a spiritual currency and touching upon the sublime, Joe McGee's paintings are strikingly contemporary yet also reference folk art and various art historical movements, such as 19th century Symbolism. Since graduating from the University of Louisville in 1986 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture, McGee (b. 1954) has explored a variety of media, often employing a muse as catalyst and inspiration for his varied creative pursuits. Previous muses have included Thomas Merton and York (who was enslaved by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and served as the indispensable guide on their famous exploration of the western part of the United States) as well as flowers, but McGee’s most abiding muse has been the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). His fascination with Kahlo began when he was an art student in the 1970s, but really cemented a decade ago after seeing Carlos Manuel’s Frida Kahlo: A Portrait performed at the Bellarmine University theatre. Already interested in her because of her work, her otherness, her lingering and rejected Catholicism, and her cultural cachet, McGee was mesmerized by the very human depiction of Kahlo presented onstage, and he has been making work in the wake of this transformative moment for ten years.
Although artist and muse have gone hand in glove since time immemorial, it behooves us to examine and consider each of these relationships thoughtfully, given how often the power dynamic between the two parties has been, historically speaking, unequal. Many famous male artists have been lauded for their genius while the (often younger) women who have inspired them have faded into obscurity. This is not the case here. Although she lived, to some degree, in the shadow of Diego Rivera, time has proven that Kahlo—who famously declared “I am my own muse”—doesn’t need anyone else to achieve or maintain epic status. Her ubiquity is undeniable; she is renowned, and her image—perhaps in some circles more so than her work—is among the most famous in the world. Like Van Gogh, Dalí, and Warhol, Kahlo transcends the art world and is deeply ingrained in pop culture. Her visage, seen on everything from t-shirts, napkins, greeting cards, to a freshly painted mural on the east side of a nearby Mexican restaurant, is a kind of unlicensed logo that has come to implicitly represent coolness, individuality, resilience, feminism, and unstoppable genius. It is, at times, difficult to separate Kahlo the artist from Kahlo as a participant—no matter how unwilling she might be—in naked, modern commerce. All of these things make Kahlo an extraordinarily difficult subject to explore, but to deny any artist the right to seek and find a muse is to impede the alchemy of art-making. What you see before you is decidedly not a Frida Kahlo exhibition—we will leave that to Museo Nacional De Arte and her eponymous museum—rather, this is an exhibition about one artist’s obsession with another; it is a celebration of the power of affinities that transcend time and culture. Sincerity and motives matter; McGee’s peculiar, ethereal, painterly works do justice to Frida’s spirit. He, too, trades and dwells in the mystic. McGee’s obscuring isn’t erasure, but rather a reverent, respectful way of acknowledging Kahlo’s significance without relying solely on her work and legacy. In fact, it is refreshing to see her partially hidden, as if McGee has politely summoned her here but hasn’t asked for the entirety of her person, rather only what she is willing to lend.
The installation is inspired by the iconography of The Fabiola Project, which consists of more than 450 reproductions of a lost 1885 painting of 4th-century Roman Saint Fabiola by French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. According to the Menil Collection, “the project was initiated by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs in the early 1990s, shortly after he moved to Mexico City. Fascinated by the artisanal culture of the city and short on funds, he decided to build an art collection for himself by combing the city’s flea markets and antique and junk shops. He expected to find copies of masterpieces by painters like Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jean-François Millet. Instead, he found and bought versions of Henner’s Fabiola, depicted in left-facing profile wearing a red headscarf. Gradually, Alÿs’s casual collecting project gathered steam as he and his friends discovered new images of the saint during their travels around the world.”
- John Brooks
Joe McGee’s work has been exhibited at McGrath Gallery, Bellarmine University; Swanson Contemporary; Green Building Gallery; Galerie Hertz; Berkley Art Center; U of L Hite Art Institute; Huntington Museum of Art, numerous private collections and the Brown Foreman Corporate Collection.
Past Exhibitions
Not A Certainty But A Circumstance
Like Cruz-Diez, the late Venezuelan master of color from whose quote the exhibition’s title is lifted, it is clear that each of these artists exult in the boundless power and wonder of color, utilizing it with a sense of control, skill, and experience; simultaneously, each artist is enamored with the magnetism and enigma of the unknown, allowing for experimentation and the pleasures of chance to materialize.
Shining in the Wind
Ryan Tassi + Matthew McDole
Although working in disparate mediums, these longtime friends and fellow skateboarders are connected via sentiment, disposition, influences, and aesthetics; through the use of distinctive visual languages, their respective work explores youth and street subcultures, loss, temporality, an alternative Americana, and the zeitgeist.
Slow Songs
Perhaps more than any other form of visual art, drawing possesses a direct and obvious connection to the practiced synthesis between hand and eye; whether it be a pencil, a pen, or a small brush, the tools employed in the act of drawing suggest an extension of the hand or the finger, eliciting memories and an acute clarity that speaks to something deep within us.
Hank Ehrenfried
I Am Not An Alchemist
Unable to halt the surge of what he calls “future presents,” Ehrenfried declares himself not to be an alchemist, yet by so deftly commemorating his own experiences he displays a beguiling grasp of temporality that belies his relatively young years; in shining a soft spotlight on the ephemerality of our collective existence, he urges the rest of us to consider what it is we wish to hold onto, and shows us how to accept its inevitable disappearance.
You Got Your Secret On
Prompted by text written by Aaron Michael Skolnick, You Got Got Your Secret On brings together works by a diverse group of artists exploring personal relationships with the natural world
Emptiness and Substance
Combining traditional techniques such as knitting and crocheting with unexpected, contemporary materials, Bette Levy and Deborah Levine explore the complexities of labor, functionality, and gender norms and expectations, as well as the convergence of craft and an aesthetic minimalism.
Ericka Jeffries
Fragments Now Bright, Now Dim
Full of intricate narrative content, Jeffries’ paintings also teem with exuberant, undeniable color; a florid, intangible force seemingly emanates from their surfaces. Since childhood, she has experienced a form of synesthesia where sounds and mental images—particularly those associated with various kinds of energy—cause her to see specific hues. As a girl, the crackle of the refrigerator freezer making ice caused her to envision deep purple aura orbs flashing; nocturnal house groans induced small orange aura orbs.
Lori Larusso
Rogue Intensities
For more than twenty years, Larusso has been showing her paintings and installations around the United States and abroad, sharing her witty and perceptive explorations of class, gender, and culture. Through depictions of animals, foods, and food-related packaging, the work in Rogue Intensities disambiguates mundane everyday experiences while celebrating surprising, complex and surreal occurrences that take place all around us.
Alex Schmitz
No Fruit Forbidden
A native Kentuckian based in Brooklyn for the last decade, Schmitz's artistic practice includes photography but is primarily focused on painting. The new works in this exhibition explore his personal experience as a gay man and an idealized self within the context of a Candideian garden.
Kiah Celeste
It Is What is Not Yet Known
Long interested in form and aesthetics, Brooklyn native Celeste began exploring the nature of and relationship between mixed materials, as well as ways to reveal their possibilities. Comprised of discarded objects, her resulting works are ostensibly sculptures; richly subtle and possessing an aslant beauty, they resist categorization.
The Shands Collection: New Directions, curated by Julien Robson
Al Shands talks about becoming a serious collector in the early 1980s when his late wife Mary helped found and lead the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation— what is now KMAC Museum. Beginning with works by regionally based artists, the couple subsequently began to focus on nationally and internationally known figures. Shands continues to collect and over the last few years his art interests have been affected by the activities of Great Meadows Foundation, his friendships with younger museum curators, and the growth of Louisville’s contemporary art scene. The Shands Collection: New Directions offers an opportunity to view works from his new collection, contextualized with works that normally reside at Al’s home.
We All Declare for Liberty: 2020 and the Future of American Citizenship
Through a process of an open call and invitations, Quappi Projects has brought together a diverse group of artists whose thoughtful, complex works aim to elucidate the state of our national politics and its future, as well as the future of American citizenship - what defines it, who it belongs to, and what it requires of us.
I Do Not Ask Any More Delight: the body and contemporary intimacy
I Do Not Ask Any More Delight: the body and contemporary intimacy, features the work of nineteen diverse artists from Louisville, New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Dayton, Seattle, as well as Germany and Brazil.
Kiah Celeste, Dominic Guarnaschelli, J. Cletus Wilcox
A Sort of River of Passing Events
Brooklyn native Kiah Celeste and Louisville natives Dominic Guarnaschelli and J. Cletus Wilcox are three Louisville-based artists whose disparate practices converge around ideas related to formal concerns, aesthetics, materiality, abstraction, process, and ambiguity of meaning.
L Autumn Gnadinger
Notably Untested Spiritual Gestures
Devotionals in search of a creed, relics desirous of believers, L Autumn Gnadinger's works neither promise healing, nor that such a thing is even possible, but they exist as instruments to nurture metaphorical experiences in an effort to find meaning and a sense of belonging.
Megan Bickel
we_are_inside_the_fire
Approaching her practice from the perspective that making relevant work requires knowledge about such diverse subjects as aesthetics, politics, science, economics, and history, Bickel employs disparate and unusual materials while using the visual language of painting to play with ideas related to perception, experience, ethics, and painting itself.
Letitia Quesenberry
(((heat)))
By combining disparate materials such as color correction film, beeswax, and sanded plexiglass with reflective or opaque materials like resin, graphite, LEDs, plaster, paint, mirrors, coal slag, and mica dust, Quesenberry creates moments of hypnotic bewilderment and intense communication.
Jacob Heustis
Beasts Will Be Still There
Full of cryptic imagery, pop culture and art historical references, grand in scale and complex in technique and content, these paintings befit our uncertain and discordant times. Formidable beasts, familiar icons, and mythological and symbolic figures loom in imaginary spaces just as they haunt our culture’s unconscious collective psyche.
Jake Ford
Unveiled
Ford’s work is a rejection of binary social systems which tend to control how we view ourselves and those around us. Using imagery and form inspired by nature and unconscious desire, this work encourages the viewer to confront the inner self, specifically the parts we repress and reject.
Jim Zimmer
Often the content is impenetrable
Zimmer utilizes common yet unexpected materials, working with a kind of automatism, exploring the boundaries of art and object, and the possibilities of parameterless creation.
Deborah Spanton
West Coast Jazz
Late last year Spanton began making work for this exhibition thinking generally about what it has meant to be a woman, but as events unfolded in 2018, her focus became more specifically concerned with the #metoo movement and her own experiences navigating through the world of dangerous men.
Vanessa Albury
All Things That Are, Are Light and Soot
Inspired by the build-up of history in dirt, dust and ivy accumulated and grown over forgotten windows on industrial buildings and her own family history, photography-based artist Vanessa Albury has created mural-scaled cyanotypes of massive and filth-caked windows in our own Portland neighborhood, just several blocks from where her grandfather William Rihn had, for many years, a machine shop on Main Street and a few miles from Six Mile Island, where her Cherokee great-great-grandparents lived.
Don’t Turn Around Don’t Look Down
This diverse group of artists share common space, energy, and a roof, but each works in his or her own individual manner and with sundry materials. Our exhibition seeks to explore the ways in which, if any, our proximity affects the course of our respective practices.
Michael James Moran
Binding What’s Lost
Moran's distinct bodies of sculpture are tied together through the essential act of questioning our human relationships with the natural world: the damage we've done, the history we forget, the beauty we overlook. Through the manipulation and framing of wood, he addresses these losses, and in binding them together readjusts our eyes to perceive the multi-faceted nature of this material: the trees which grow, which once grew.
Whit Forrester
Photosynthetic Transfigurations: A Work in Progress
Forrester’s photographs are unique art objects; gold leaf is applied by hand to each individual work. Gold stands in for the divine because it is ineffable; in a way it is a form of light. Forrester’s gold circles and semicircles are reminiscent of the halos of numerous saints in medieval and Renaissance artworks, but they riff on those traditional representations of überholiness and instead depict the universality of the divine from a perspective of new materialism, queerness, and quantum feminism.
Vian Sora
N O W H E R E
Born in Baghdad, Iraq, the entirety of Sora’s youth was spent under the inescapable shadow of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party; the personal stories and journeys of her family and friends are inseparable from what she describes as the “mandates and masochism” of one of the 20th century’s most cruel and craven dictators.
Adam Chuck
Instant Gratification
Taking found photos, curated by amateur photographers rendering them in paint at an intimate scale, he takes these explicit moments and presents them like specimens or a small photo like a Polaroid, examining the way many humans present themselves on the internet.