Ochi Projects is pleased to present Windows a solo-exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Nick McPhail. The exhibition is on view from January 11 – February 15, 2020 with an opening reception on January 11, 2020 from 6:00-9:00 pm. The exhibition includes a series of new works, paintings exploring perspective and access, light and landscape, architecture and interstices. Peering over the top of a rolling asphalt hill to see the wavering horizon line below, suddenly dipping out of view, McPhail paints an intangible perspective, quietly revealing its own impossibility. Another perspective, this time from the inside, peering out a window into a sprawling parking lot at the base of a lush mountain range cast in shimmering pink light, echoes the patterning of looking through memory, where edges bend to meet, without regard for spatial accuracy, anew.

McPhail sees himself as a voyeur, painting from snapshots and glances of ordinary moments, inquisitively filling in the gaps of what is just out of sight with bursts of color emanating from within the paintings surface. Cars, nearly out of frame, lend to this feeling of the fleeting, destabilized vantage point in much of the work. Often painted from snapshots of street views, McPhail’s attention to detail collides with his desire to intuit what he can’t see; there is a sense of being in the passenger seat on a tour through a familiar neighborhood, or a tranquil moment of reflection, gazing out a window. The window is used here as a device to ask the more existential questions present in the frame; McPhail meanders through the space between public and private, memory and misremembering, an accumulation of moments layered onto the canvas, the equivocal yet vulnerable palimpsest, occasionally leaving traces of previous iterations behind.

Nick McPhail (b. 1982) is a painter and ceramist that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He combines elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, and other more functional objects. His paintings function as a contemporary exploration of history painting, and range in subject matter from immediate landscape-based work to minimal line paintings. McPhail’s recent solo exhibitions include: “Lights” (2019) at Un(titled) 1983 in Geneva, Switzerland and “Pictures” (2018) at Holiday in Los Angeles, California. Recent selected group exhibitions include: “Chains” (2019) at Central Park Gallery and “Wholly Coast” (2019) at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, California.