September 14 – October 23, 2004
Through painting over photographic images of quintessential childhood holiday celebrations—Christmas, Easter, Halloween—Megan McGinnis subtly changes the focus of the images to allude to brooding anxieties and ambiguities that linger beneath the surface. Visual ruptures—bleeds, scars, streaks, and blurs—efface and deform the figures and objects in the all-too familiar scenes and point to possible future psychological discomforts. Drawing indiscriminately from personal and found family albums, McGinnis stresses the ubiquity, normalcy, and generic nature of the images, which appear particularly disquieting as they manifest their instabilities not despite, but because of, the commonality of the experience.