Evie McKenna - Artist

Evie McKenna is an artist and animator born near the lower Delaware River in Chester, PA, and is now living in the western Catskill mountains of New York State close to the upper Delaware River. She has exhibited her print work at the Wave Hill House, Queens Museum, the Concord Museum and Ricco-Maresca gallery among other venues. Her films have been screened internationally as well as locally in such festivals as the Big Eddy Film Festival, Fantastical Film Festival and the Bruge International Film Festival. She has received a new works grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, the NYFA Catalogue Project grant and she was selected as a SuCasa teaching artist multiple times. Residencies include the Montello Foundation, Yaddo, the Chinati Foundation, PS122 and the Wave Hill Winter Artist Program. She has taught extensively, working at School of Visual Arts, Pratt, Brooklyn College and the Catskill Art Space among others.

Myopia is a condition where distant objects appear to be blurry while closer things look normal. I am rearranging the terms in this definition and by terms, I mean the focus or clarity of my botanical subjects. The confusion vs. recognition of the sharpness within a popular and familiar subject allow me to make a tableau with my subject that fuses my vision onto one plane.

The disciplines that I am currently using are areas where I am fusing my background, drawing and animation. In certain ways, the tech changes in photography that initially seemed to make the process easier, propelled me to look at how the hand of the artist could still be seen. Seeing through lenses is a fascination and the process of finding a type of correctness or sharpness was of less interest to me than the path taken to get there. In these works, I often stop halfway where sharp focus lay next to near abstraction. By using overlays of drawn and painted patterns, I could meld the two into a game of choice for the viewer. I intentionally leave areas of the work unaltered and recognizable. The altered image is made with materials that have properties that are imprecise, messy and clearly not identified with the botanicals as they exist.

My animations are short, and by design, they are asking viewers to suspend belief in the world as we know it, by taking a familiar and popular subject of the botanical world, and to ask you to reconsider what you know and are sure of and what is shifting beneath your feet every day. Color is huge, pattern also, and that is another reason why the wealth of both of these attributes is abundant in the natural world. The trance like feel of a friendly subject being reconfigured on the big or small screen is transportive. The experimental nature of the work challenges an expectation of narrative and the suspension of an exact focal plane which is part of the experience of myopia, is an objective of the work.

I live in upstate New York, in an inspiring landscape, part of which is my garden and other parts are forest land. My teaching experience includes teaching at SVA, Pratt, Brooklyn College and at various workshops teaching photography. My work as photo editor involved major publications at The New Yorker, Time Inc. and Rodale Press.