Stephanie McMahon (b.1976, Rochester, NY) lives and works in Alfred, NY.
McMahon earned an MFA from The University Texas at Austin. She has been included in exhibitions at Drawer, NY; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Northern Illinois Art Museum; Tang Contemporary, Beijing, China; Zhangzhou International Art Museum, China; Gravity Gallery, North Adams, MA; and Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY among others. McMahon is recipient of the Memorial Art Gallery Award of Excellence, New York Foundation for the Arts Strategic Opportunity Grant and a Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. She was an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris and Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Her work has been reviewed and published in Art Maze Magazine, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic and New American Paintings Blog and Magazine. She is currently a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University.

My paintings extract and distill my observations and perceptions of a particular environment while presenting the possibilities of visual experience and abstraction. Weaving in and out of referential forms, colors and elemental shapes, I allow for intuitive and contradictory responses that fluctuate between deliberate and incidental. Initial explorations can shift abruptly as the painting develops, challenging one’s sense of time and resolve. The result is both tangible and fleeting as unexpected and precarious relationships emerge between thin, translucent layers. Gestural brushstrokes impart physicality yet glide weightlessly over smooth surfaces as figure ground relationships oscillate and conflate. Fluid marks are often contained within a shape or stopped by a sharp edge in contrast to the gesture, revealing both transitory and measured time. Individual actions are condensed into abbreviated shapes as I embrace the flatness of the picture plane and the illusionistic depth of the brush stroke. My process is both calculated and open, creating an active space for visual exploration that connects to the present moment while reconstructing a previous experience.

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