Press Release -

Ackerman Studios, CURA Art and la BEAST gallery present “Transience”; an exhibition of paintings by Amy MacKay at The Beverly Hills Hotel

Nineteenth century American painter and leading advocate of the art for art’s sake movement, James McNeill Whistler, described his ambition to make works that were “like breath on glass”: fleeting, delicate, ephemeral. That impulse, to hold onto a moment even as it slips away, resonates deeply in the practice of Amy MacKay (b. 1985, Sonoma, California). MacKay also shares with Whistler the insistence on painting from memory, who would spend days and nights observing his subject matter, only to paint it once it had been submerged into his subconscious. MacKay’s paintings emerge from a choreography of encounter, memory, and translation.

MacKay’s work begins not on the canvas, but in the staging of collective events. Drawing on myths, folklore, and literature - from the Greek tale of Asclepius to Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats - she invites collaborators into performances that are themselves temporary constellations of story and gesture. These gatherings are documented through photographs, interviews, and video, but the true work unfolds in her studio, where the act of translation takes hold. Each canvas undergoes cycles of making and unmaking; images are laid down and destroyed, marks are accumulated and erased.

The surface becomes less a record of what occurred than a site of forgetting, carrying the distortions of memory, the slippages that occur when stories are retold, the uncanny mutations of shared experience over time. They hover between theatre and image, presence and disappearance, capturing not the event itself, but the fragile interval between experience and its remembrance.

MacKay’s work reminds us that every image contains its own vanishing point. To paint, here, is to linger in the fragile space between presence and erasure, past and present; to make visible, if only for an instant, what slips continually from view.

MacKay received an MFA from UC Irvine in 2018 and a BA from Bard College, New York in 2007. Currently based in Los Angeles, she has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as la BEAST, Phase Gallery, Baert Gallery and the Honolulu Museum. She has received numerous awards, notably the Jon Imber Painting Fellowship and Leo Freedman Fellowship.