FROM MEMENTO MORI TO VISUAL ALCHEMY:
NANCY MACKO'S DECOMPOSITIONS
2024
"The photographs in Nancy Macko’s ‘Decompositions’ series present amorphous forms floating in a watery ether. Light streaks through the compositions, muted slightly by a translucent film that gives the whole composition the soft patina of an old master painting...hovering between abstraction and representation. Momentarily arresting this process with her camera, Macko presents a vision of time and life that is cyclical and fluid...presenting compositions that exist in a delicious state of indeterminacy."
– Eleanor Heartney, 2021
Odalisque, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
The Light In the Creek, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches
Choke Stool Faerie, 2021, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
Wound, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches
Garlic Cotton, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 24 inches
Onion Eels, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
Garlic Sheaves, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches
Passage, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 80 inches
Tidepool with Sea Lions, 2022, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
"Mackos' vision resonates with works of other artists who have dwelled on transformation. In Odalisque, cabbage leaves fold like fleshy pillows, and silken, swooning contours recall the languid French odalisques of Jean Dominique Ingres. There is also a hint of surrealist metamorphic imagery in which food stuff transmutes into other life forms. For example, in Macko's Lochness, a celery stalk becomes a strange hybrid creature, at once vegetal and animal."
– Mary Davis MacNaughton
Dickinson, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 inches
Lochness, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 inches
Miss Havisham's Desk, 2020, Archival pigment print, 36 x 24 inches
After Pollock, 2020, Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches
Weather Patterns, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
Green Web, 2020, Archival pigment print, 36 x 24 inches
Vigil, 2022, Archival pigment print, 36 X 24 inches
Divine Intervention, 2022, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
Asparagus Kindling, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
Anemone Garden, 2022, Archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches
"To convey life in flux, Macko creates images that have multiple associations, often calling up the landscape or the body. In Garlic Sheaves, paper-thin skins give rise to twisted tree trunks slowly disintegrating on the forest floor; in Compression, compacted carrots, celery, and onions elicit settling geologic strata. In Wound, a seed pod evokes a fetus forming in a womb."
– Mary Davis MacNaughton
