NEW YORK, NY.- Here Then and Now, Lisa Mackie’s large-scale multimedia installation is on view at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street. The exhibition remains on view through October 9.

Mackie transforms the gallery space into a rich environment within itself, sated with imaginative hanging solar objects – sun and moon, provocative color in mixed media paintings, free-standing sculpture and a video projection with narrative voice-over of Béla Bartók’s “Mikrokosmos.”

Mackie, abstract painter, master printer and ambitious storyteller fascinated with the ancient organism, the Horseshoe Crab, ardently seeks to convey the common characteristics of evolution between human and creature by using the horseshoe crab metaphorically.

Mackie often speaks of her work as being a composite of her psyche. Here, she assumes subject character, and as protagonist, leads us through the venturesome environment. “ I am this Horseshoe Crab, floundering and yet harmonious with the waves,” writes Mackie in her poem, The Horseshoe Crab Here Then and Now.

Characteristically, Mackie casts a specific synthesis of decisions when staging her environment--objects, media, placement, orientation, scale and color. Here, Mackie evokes through metaphor the concept of the beginning of life with display of life size, free-standing sculptures that symbolize The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

Mackie employs filmic storytelling with video images cast upon an immense wall painting and with herself as voice-over, continuing the drama of the dual ability of the horseshoe crab and human to survive in this ever changing environment. “ As a beautiful female, shiny, wet, smooth classic shape, I walk the beach under the full Strawberry Moon. The crevices of my shell are packed with eggs that are over spilling everywhere.” (Strawberry Moon, 2018).

Mackie’s color-laden book titled The Horseshoe Crab Here Then and Now, with multiple images that, while abstract, convey, with every turned page, unity, through a story line from a collection of Mackie’s thoughts perceiving the life of the historic 440 million year-old creature. Mackie as both narrator and protagonist allows as voyeur, the perceptive viewer, to witness tenacity with ongoing renewal as in her book every turned page is indeed a continuous incident.

Here Then and Now reflects the artist’s process in which innumerable variations on the central theme of life progression have been brought together in a spirited musing. It is the life cycle itself – human and animal- that has been devised to amazing dramatic effect by Mackie.

A native of Detroit, Mackie received a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. She lives and works in New York City. Mackie is represented in numerous private and corporate collections, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA, Brooklyn Museum, NY, Worcester Art Museum, MA, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, NJ, Yale University Art Gallery, CN, National Museum, Poznan, Poland, and the Japan Trade Corporation.