Artist Heather MacRae presents recent painting and collages, exploring sexuality, the human body and WORD, in solo exhibition at Sulfur Studios.

“pedal” | HEATHER MACRAE
July 23-28th
Closing reception: July 26, 6-9PM

The gallery at Sulfur Studios presents “Pedal,” a solo exhibition of paintings and collages by Heather MacRae, opening July 26 6-9PM. The artist’s recent work utilizes pornography as its source material and engages in concepts of liberation, self-expression, understanding and inclusion, in this often taboo platform. Rather than a system of oppression, the artist contends that her subject matter has the ability to open pathways to positive sexual exploration for a myriad of identities.

MacRae, fascinated by the commercial aesthetics of intense erotic imagery, chooses to focus her works on the structure of the body. In her collage series “Build,” the artist delicately cuts selections of the female body and presents them devoid of environmental context, their sexual partner, or their own facial expression. The resulting images are arranged into single words from these tenderly sliced elbows, knees, hands, hair or legs. Selecting words like ‘build’ function as reference to both concept of the body as a mechanical element and an entity.

Most recently, MacRae has been creating figurative paintings based on pornographic images. These works present clippings of the human form, floating in ambiguous decorative environments. Her figures remain faceless, an act that voids personal feelings of exploitation and domination, and plays with the tension of personal and public in porn. Through this work, the artist confronts her feelings of discomfort, unease or shame in the subject of desire and sexuality. Ultimately, MacRae rejects the idea of porn as singularly male-centric and exploitative, in favor of its’ ability to be a space for empowering those that lie beyond the identity of cis-gendered male.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Heather MacRae’s most recent works have fluctuated between the figure and the relationship to the environment and the body as its own habitat and the exploration of internal environment. MacRae is a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design. MacRae graduated from SCAD with her MFA in Painting and her Bachelors in Art from Hartwick College. She currently lives and works in Savannah, GA.