SUE MCNALLY: MINING THE MIDDLE
August 26 - October 8, 2023
In the John Little Barn
Reception: Saturday, August 26, 5-7pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, August 27, 3pm

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present SUE MCNALLY: MINING THE MIDDLE an exhibition of large-scale paintings and collage studies by the Rhode Island-based artist. The exhibit will be on view in the John Little Barn from August 26 through October 8, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, August 26, and an artist’s talk on Sunday, August 27 at 3pm. 

Sue McNally has been studying landscape for over 30 years. After decades of traveling the United States, she has developed a personal relationship with the American landscape which has allowed her to loosen her ties to traditional practices like plein-air painting. This transition empowered her to create what would become a new approach to landscape painting, informed by the hierarchies of abstraction, and focused on the process, over depiction. This progression fell in line with the drive that propels her work. She states, “I challenge my physical habits, my skill and my intellectual vision. I do this by continually teaching myself something new, whether it be conceptual or technical, while working through ongoing projects.” McNally now refers to the landscape as the substructure of her abstraction, but this is not just a formal or conceptual declaration. It represents the struggle to determine which elements of the landscape get to live within the abstraction, and which aspects of abstraction better depict the vitality of the landscape. These efforts are revealed in the collage studies McNally has included in the exhibition. ”The most exciting and intellectually satisfying type of expression for me is the feeling of discovery, the feeling that I am struggling, finding my way through a problem” says the artist. “Struggle creates my best work. When I am unsure of what I am producing, and feeling like there is no thread, no understanding, that is the most important phase of discovery.”

When a friend told the McNally her paintings were “Mining the Middle,” the geological metaphor aptly  describes her evolution. The landscape may be the bedrock of her work, but it erupts, grows, cracks and dissolves, and is rebuilt in the process of a painting.

Sue McNally (born  1967, Washington D.C.) is a painter living in Newport, RI, working in both Rhode Island and southeast Utah. She grew up in New England and received a BFA from the University of Rhode Island in 1990 and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. Sue has been a resident artist for McCanna House for North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute: Invited Artist collaborating with Student Printers, Carrizozo AIR, Crater Lake National Park , Two Coats of Paint, Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. Collections include (added these) Addison Gallery of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art,  Tamarind Institute Archive ,  The Worcester Art Museum, The RISD Museum of Art, The Newport Art Museum, Fidelity Investment Corporate Collection and Wellington Management Corporate Collection.