A Portrait
by Eva Recinos
Christina McPhee, Conflagration, oil, pastel, acrylic gel, ink, graphite, and paper collage on canvas, 48 x 39 x 2.5 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
A PORTRAIT
EVA RECINOS / APRIL 2021 / ISSUE 7
Commission: a portrait, to be hung in a large gilded frame, for posterity
Medium: paint, but open to mixed media
Schedule: available for virtual or socially distanced sitting sessions
Clothing:
I think about the outfits I once wore en la sala. A black dress. Just the right length. Short enough to show off my legs, which are shaved, of course. My mom says my legs are like my grandma’s legs, full and tan—but no cleavage, no midriff. Not too tight, but tight enough to be form-fitting. Finished off with the perfect pair of heels.
Chucks with lyrics written on the side of them from my favorite rock bands. Each word carefully inked onto the side, a form of tattooing before I could get a tattoo. I wanted Dr. Marten boots. I liked wearing chunky boots because I felt like I could stomp around in them when I walked. I wanted to cause a scene but I also wanted to be able to run away. Joan Jett and Brody Dalle and all the other punk girls wouldn’t wear feminine shoes. They wore combat boots they could mosh in and jump in and break a guitar in. I wanted chaos but it didn’t come in the form of kitten heels. Not to my teenage mind, at least.
My hair would be done in curls or if not, perfectly straightened. Sleek. Baby hairs smoothed down. A bit of makeup, but not too much. No piercings or tattoos in sight. Nails clean or neatly painted, no chips flaking off.
In high school, we’re not allowed to wear hair colors or nail polish colors that aren’t “natural.” I poke through pins from Hot Topic on my blazer, the one I have to wear to school masses. They’re pins of favorite bands, or of quirky art. The blazer is heavier than our everyday uniform, but I use the lapels as a small rebellion.
I point, casually, to the natural scene beyond me. The palm trees in a row contrasting against the blue sky. Maybe an airplane in the distance. A couple of pigeons, or the hawk that likes to sit on the power lines. A stray cat walks along the brick wall, toeing the line between our house and the neighbor’s. A ghetto bird lingers.
Back inside, in the background, is a painting of the Last Supper that hung on the wall near our dinner table.
I want to be somewhere sticky and dark and crowded. Somewhere where the music blares through the speakers and the thud of it goes straight through your chest. Where the feedback from a guitar feels like it might pierce my eardrum. I want my teeth to chatter in my mouth from the force of the sounds, chaotic and fast, straight from the amps to my brain. Other times, I want to be in the band. To scream and yell and sing—to fling myself into the crowd, as they catch me. This will be a form of release. A strange christening in the dark.
My mom tells me to close the curtains at a certain hour, so our neighbors can’t see inside. Sometimes, as I walk around to each curtain, I feel like a princess in a castle. Unaware of what awaits her outside.
In college, I wear heels often. The higher, the better. I’m petite but I want to be seen. My shoes are tight but my dress is tighter. The best part of getting drunk is not feeling the pain of my toes crammed into those shiny shoes. My friends and I chat about which girls manage to keep their shoes on all night and which ones can’t stand it. How long a girl can suffer through the night with her heels is a sign of strength.
I step out of the car wearing a floral top and a light sweater, even though it’s hot out. My brother teases me, smacks me lightly where he knows my new tattoo sits. Eventually, my mom figures it out. I’ve inked another part of my body and she narrows her eyes and sighs. This is what I will wear, no matter the outfit—my decision to make my skin into something new. I do it a few times, each one a different experience. Once, I got chills while the needle skated across my flesh. I reveled in my ability to put up with the pain but also to come away from that shop with a new flower on my body each time.
Today, I wear whatever pair of pants are nearby but I really only own two pairs of jeans because I find them constricting. Yoga pants and sweatpants and hoodies: there’s no dressing up because there’s no going out. I wash my hair every few days and sometimes use the curl cream and other times make a small ponytail. There’s a cat next to me, who hops on the desk and interrupts my work. There’s a spray bottle on the table next to gloves. A hook on the wall for hanging what I wear when I leave the house, which is only occasionally. How long a person can stay inside seems to be tied to how much they fear the outdoors.
If you can figure out a way to put these all in one portrait, I would be indebted to you.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features, and profiles have been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Artsy, Jezebel and more. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, PANK, Electric Literature, Blood Orange Review and more. She is currently working on a memoir in essays.
Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Across drawing, painting, video, networked and photo-based processes, she engages potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her new paintings in the series Trickster Utopia (2020-2021) entangle sensations of human, plant and animal spirits in a mashup of landscape, anime, and collage, together with traces of text and performance. Born in Los Angeles, McPhee grew up on the Great Plains in Nebraska. Museum collections of her work across media are with the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Art Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Colorado Springs Art Museum at Colorado College; and internationally, with Thresholds New Media Collection in Scotland. Solo exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C. and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, for her project Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries. She has participated in many international group exhibitions, notably with documenta 12. Drawings based on the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, plus a new video/audio collaboration with Ashon Crawley, will be in the group exhibition Otherwise/Revival, at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (April-July 2021). Her drawings have most recently appeared in print with Radical Philosophy (fall 2019) alongside an essay by philosopher Rei Terada. McPhee lives and works in central coast California.