Grace McNerney’s (b. 2001, Harrogate), paintings are a pursuit through popular culture in search of the undercurrent of sex, religion, and death that underpins consumer imagery. Her work challenges the algorithms and images we are exposed to everyday, simultaneously informing and describing our tastes. She prefers her paintings saturated and soft, achieved through a buildup of thin layers of paint blended to evoke the slightly out-of-focus images of her subjects.
The paintings act as long form collages, built up over several weeks or months from second hand sourced vinyl sleeves, women’s and mens magazines, recipe books. Through her library of ‘low-brow’ references McNerney is in search of the images that tell the stories of the people who once owned them. While often very ‘of their time’ they somehow follow us through elapses of decades and evolutions in media, informing the generation of new popular culture icons that aren’t as innovative as they might first appear.
Her degree show presentation at Chelsea College of Arts (2023) was a meditation on regional open-plan office culture and a commentary on the peripheral microcultures generated by the service economy. More recently, Grace’s focus has been on the transience of pop culture phenomena: how people are collectively enthralled by an event or place or person for a period of time, before collectively moving on to the next big thing, almost simultaneously.