Curator’s Note

Siobhan McBride’s paintings live at the edge of recognition, where memory stutters and dreams take on the precision of a diagram. Rendered in gouache with surgical intent, her works seem at first to be digital mirages: screenshots from a simulation we half-recall, but their hand-painted complexity defies that assumption. The violence and care embedded in her technique, taping, slicing, layering, echo the tensions within the scenes themselves: structured yet porous, intimate yet estranged.

The spaces she paints are not invented; they are remembered. But memory here is not a passive retrieval; it is a construction, full of thresholds, vignettes, and interruptions. A bathroom door cracked open, a cluster of trees lit like stage scenery, a traffic signal framed by blurred strangers: these images are not merely seen, they are inhabited. McBride offers viewers not fixed tableaux but containers for projection, encounter, and delay.

Throughout this selection, we encounter the interiority of rooms and the exposed edges of environments (domestic, urban, pastoral), each folded with suggestion, haunted by absence. The paintings flicker with the unsettling clarity of deja vu. Light moves not to illuminate but to complicate; gradients spill and stall. Objects and shadows are flattened into paper-thin architectures, yet the emotional dimensionality is vast.

McBride describes her work as born from a liminal identity: a Korean-born adoptee raised in a white American family. This in-betweenness becomes not only a theme but a formal principle. The paintings fragment and fuse. They contain contradictions: charged stillness, vulnerable structure, and restrained excess that mirror the negotiation of cultural and personal identity. Like rice paddies etched into a hillside, her surfaces are cut, raised, filled, and scraped, holding complexity in tension with control.

There is something cinematic about McBride’s vision, but it resists narrative closure. Instead, she gives us a world just past language: a dream not quite recovered, a room just exited, a story just about to turn. Each image asks us not just to look, but to pause, to stay with the unsettled mood of something at once deeply personal and shared.