Excerpt from Vernissage TV page:
Simchowitz currently presents “When There’s Nothing Left,” the second solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Shaina McCoy (b. 1993, Minneapolis MN), at Hill House in Pasadena, California. This new body of work explores McCoy’s family history through archival photographs, celebrating both monumental moments and the beauty of everyday life. The series shows figures with featureless faces engaged in embraces, conveying a universal human experience that invites viewers to see themselves in these moments. McCoy’s work emphasizes the significance of cherishing our connections and honoring the time spent with loved ones. In this video Shaina McCoy guides us through the exhibition and talks about her work.
Shaina McCoy: When There’s Nothing Left / Simchowitz Hill House, Pasadena. October 20, 2024.
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Un-edited digital transcript of interview:
S. MccCoy: Hello, my name is Shayna McCoy, and you're here at my solo exhibition at the Sinkaweds Hill House Gallery out in Pasadena, California. And I have decided to share these works. They are all together in a series titled When There's Nothing Left, which I want the viewer to finish and feel like we are all we have as family, as community and friends.
So I decided to depict a lot of moments and a lot of still experiences between family and friends where they're embracing one another. Here you'll see a painting of my mother and myself when I was little.
I'm the first daughter and the oldest. And throughout the exhibition, you also see more paintings of my mom and I. So we also have these little works, which I did start out making when I first started painting.
They were at a scale of five inches by seven inches. And I did them for a benefit in Minneapolis for the houseless community. So in high school, we did 30 paintings and all of those went to a benefit called Art for Shelter.
And we were able to provide housing and food for the houseless community and the Twin Cities. So that's where I keep doing them because they always remind me of home and to continue to do something not only for myself, but for other people.
I'm a big giver and a big lover, so I always think about other people. And through these works, you'll see that this is a painting of my grandpa and I. He's also here today from Chicago. This is a painting of my mom and my cousin, Kaylee, and my grandmother, who recently passed in May with my cousin, who's also named after her, Anita.
Two friends at a wedding. I've started to take more photographs as my own references to start painting from to extend the archive that we have for my grandpa. He is my main inspiration. I go to a lot of his photographs as references for the pieces and I think about 80 to 90 percent of my paintings are based after his work.
He's here today, so it's really fun to see him look at the work and enjoy it and take it in and recognize that this is also his work as well. So we have a lifelong collaboration and that's so beautiful to me and I'm so lucky to be able to do that because his love for my family also became my love for my family and how he sees the world is how I began to see it as well.
So we kind of work back and forth and I enjoy that a lot. And we have my friend and her brother, my friend and her little brother's friends. Sometimes I'd paint other people's family as a decision to step outside and recognize another moment or experience that another person was having.
Here we have more paintings of friends. This is myself and my friend Brianna and my grandma and I at my last solo exhibition, which was here in Los Angeles in 2022. I needed to have this here because it was an important part of my grieving process.
As my grandma can't be here today, I made sure that she was still with us and I think that's something very special because our energy is very much here and I'm very thankful for her. This is my cousin and myself, Tanisha.
And then I have this large painting piece here, which is my great-grandmother and my little brother. My great-grandmother, she doesn't like getting on planes, so we send her lots of pictures and videos.
This is a photograph that I've taken of them recently. We're from Minnesota, so you always see the jerseys of Vikings. They're big Vikings fans. I thought this was such a very, very sweet experience to watch them and how they bond.
I believe it's 84 and he's 15. Just to see them have conversations back and forth and how he's so curious about her. She just spends time with him telling him stories. I think that's something that I enjoy.
I've been enjoying watching them grow together. And then this is my cousin D and Z at their wedding. They are twins, if you can already tell. I thought that moment was very sweet. We also bond over food when we break bread with each other.
We bond over moments of doing each other's care or just holding each other simply like this photo you see here of my grandpa holding my aunt. This is the first painting that I started for this whole series.
I just admire how he told us and also photographs everything throughout our livelihoods.
H. Schmidt: So, your work is very personal and why did you leave the faces blank?
S. MccCoy: It's a happy mistake. So I went to arts high school in Minnesota. It's called Cuppage Center for Arts Education, and I wanted to execute badly to paint real faces and to paint exactly what was on the reference photo, and I couldn't do that.
We thought that you were worthy of praise as a student, you know, in your 12th grade year of high school, that if you could paint exactly what was on that photograph, that you could you could do anything and that you were a cool kid because you could paint that thing, and I just couldn't, and I tried and I tried and I was new to the material, to oil paint.
I couldn't afford it coming from my lower middle class background. I've never used oil paint before my 12th grade year of high school, and we had a project where we had to knock out 30 paintings and and pick our subject matter, and so we had so much time to do so, and I decided to pick up my grandfather's photographs from my mother's home and take them back to school and just sit there and paint, paint, paint, and I said, I'm just going to do away with the faces. I don't know how to do them, and I thought that was very much like, I didn't think it was art. I wasn't confident in it, and that made me so frustrated as a youth and the arts being surrounded by so many other talented individuals that I couldn't do that thing, and I had a teacher who came to our class and she was like, she was a Megan.
She was amazing. Her name was Megan Rye, and she's also a painter, and she recognized that I was really putting in these efforts to attempt something, and she's like, you don't need to put facial features on it to for it to be art, to be considered art, and I thought, wow, I'm just sitting here crying, class crit, like, oh my gosh, she thinks it's art and she thinks it's beautiful, and she's like, you have to continue to do to do this. It's uniquely you, and I think there's something there, and so since 2012, I've been painting without facial features. That's my happy mistake, just carrying it on my back, you know?
I've never felt the need to paint faces because so many other artists do that thing, and here I am just putting in the emotions of it through the brushstrokes and filling in the facial features with the cheeks and the impressions of the forehead and the chin and the ear structure and how the hair lays and the patternation, so it's more of a feeling than anything.
H. Schmidt: Yeah, happy coincidence because it's perfect. Thank you. Thank you. And how did you come to, yeah, you've mentioned a little bit of art school, but have you always this urge to be an artist?
S. MccCoy: Yes, I've always been a creative growing up. My family always knew to give me creative birthday gifts so I had my hands on everything from beads to weaving to painting and drawing and when pastels and they just let me have everything and I'm so thankful that they nourished that creative spirit that I had growing up because they could have told me hey you have to you know think about other things and they've decided that's okay this is her and we want to fill her cup with that so I thank my mom and my dad and the rest of my family for giving me that push and recognizing like this is my thing and to let me have that.
A lot of people think that you'll be a starving artist and that it won't work out and I think being creative is cathartic. I think it's medicinal it helps it helps me through my grief as having lost many family members and it just feels so good to like love on each other and celebrate each other in this way yeah.
H. Schmidt: What's happening in the water?
S. MccCoy: And people, you can't say anything. We'll have a lot of time.