Skyler McGee presents small works that are narratives of time, location, and substance. For McGee, they tell an ambiguous story of how we build our lives, layer by layer.

Each piece is comprised of drawings sealed by a thick layer of resin. On top of that drawing is another drawing, again sealed with resin. Once sealed, the drawings are unchangeable. Works are often six or seven layers thick. McGee notes, “The artistic process mirrors the process of building a life, one layer at a time. As time passes we are able to observe our histories, both individual and corporate, but not alter them. With only the current layer to build upon, we become people of presence – integrating, making unity, binding disparate parts together, creating beauty.”

It is this dynamic that the work not only catalogs, but celebrates. It embraces the tenuous nature of creating purpose when human kind is fraught with the unknowable. Through capturing the complexity of how we layer our lives, it affirms the inherent value of the process. The layering of the pieces is an homage to the complex layering of human existence, of change, and the condition of being finite. im]permenance stands at the apex of what is and what could be, hearkening to both the beauty found in the strata of human choice.
 
Skyler McGee is a mixed-media artist based in Durham, NC. She holds a BFA from Metro State College of Denver with a minor in Art History. She has also studied plein air painting on location in Giverny, France, at the home of Claude Monet. Gestural and complex, her work borders the lines of both abstraction and representation. She works in oils, resin, watercolor, fiber, graphite and encaustic. Based on imagery from the natural world, her work explores layers, and the ordering of interior and social space. Cost: free