News
Winter 2024
dual exhibition with henry gepfer
K. MacNeil and Henry Gepfer will be exhibiting their collaborative work at the Fried Fruit Gallery at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington in March 2024. During their time there, they will be giving a joint artist lecture, and providing a monotype workshop at the Mohan Scholz LGBTQ+ Resource Center. They will also be performing live on the opening night, March 1 from 6-9PM.
Winter 2024
Exhibition & residency at University at buffalo
In February 2024, MacNeil was invited to be a visiting artist in residence at the University at Buffalo, working with the printmaking students in the Intaglio & Collagraph class. In addition, they had an exhibition of text-based work on view at the UB Project Space, titled What I’ve Been Trying to Say, which featured a participatory performance reading of an artist book.
Winter 2024
Feature in the “Rogues’ Gallery”
MacNeil’s work as a letterpress printer and the College Printer at Massey College was featured in the “Rogues’ Gallery” of Fall/Winter 2024 volume of the Devil’s Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts, #93. This journal can be purchased online here, or viewed in person at the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College.
fall 2023
Summer and Fall exhibitions
MacNeil’s installation piece, I THINK MY COUGH DROPS ARE GASLIGHTING ME, was featured in a number of group exhibitions in 2023. In the summer, the work shown at Zygote Press for the exhibition, We’re Here, We’re Queer: A Letterpress Exhibition. In the Fall, the work exhibited at the 2023 Mid America Print Council’s Member’s Exhibition, juried by Golnar Adili; in Celebrating Print during Print Week in Lawrence, Kansas; and at Good Bones, an exhibition hosted by Mineral House Media in Chattanooga, TN.
Spring 2023
Open Studio Print Speak: A print speak designed to exist in passing time
From June 1, 2023:
In this Print Speak session: A Print Speak Designed to Exist in Passing Time, K. MacNeil discusses their artistic practice at the intersection of print and performance. MacNeil traces how these mediums have developed in their work as a means of exploring themes of trauma, illness, and gender identity. Integrating the foundational concepts of print alongside embodied mark-making, performance, and video-based media, this talk examines how all these diverse media intersect and their aims to push the definition of print into further dimensions.
Spring 2023
University of toronto magazine feature: We’re going to print like it’s 1899
MacNeil’s work as an instructor and the head printer at the Bibliography Room at Massey College, University of Toronto, was featured in the UofT Alumni Magazine, along with the Book History and Print Culture graduate students MacNeil supervises.
Fall 2022
exhibition: beyond the norm 2022 international juried Print exhibition
MacNeil’s work was selected out of 65 artists by Juror Carmon Colangelo, celebrating the 45th anniversary of Normal Editions. The exhibition is on view from Oct. 27-Dec. 18 at University Galleries, Illinois State University.
august 2022
interview with femme art review
An interview with Adi Berardini of Femme Art Review, in which we discuss my recent exhibition, at-home apothecary, or EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF, as well as past work, influences, and more.
July 2022
Exhibition review published in Healthy Debate
A review of at-home apothecary, or EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELEIF, written by Katherine van Kampen,. Van Kampen is a medical student at McMaster University, interested in MedEd and the intersection of health and humanities.
june 2022
solo exhibition at centre[3]
at-home apothecary, or EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF is on view at Centre[3] from June 1-June 30th.
“At-home apothecary draws from lifelong management of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and personal experiences navigating medical and cultural support systems prevalent in Western society. From paintings of psychotropic medications to drawings of used Q-tips, this work engages experiences of physical ailment, addiction, and mental distress and the various ways these topics are obscured in North American culture.”
SPring/summer 2022
publication in Risd Museum’s “Manual”
MacNeil’s writing and art is featured in Manual, the twice-yearly publication produced by the RISD Museum.
Manual 17, titled Variance, considers representations of the disabled and/or ill body in art and visual culture, foregrounding the ways that body-mind variance can inform technique, style, and form. These works range from moralizing and stereotypical historical images to prideful images made by modern and contemporary disabled and/or ill artists. This issue of Manual is a companion to the exhibition Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability, curated by Conor Moynihan, on view at the RISD Museum now through October 9, 2022.
spring 2022
hamilton artists inc. x factory media centre:
micro grant recipient ($1000)
MacNeil has been selected as a recipient for a Factory Media Centre x Hamilton Artists Inc. micro grant. This grant covers equipment rental through the Factory Media Centre, which will be used to document a new performance series they’ve been developing for the past year+. This work will be in made collaboration with MacNeil’s partner Andrew McEwan, exploring intimacy, mutual aid, and queer, Mad acts of care through the intersections of print and performance.
Spring 2022
Ontario arts council:
visual artists creation project grant ($7500)
MacNeil was awarded an Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project grant at the Mid-Career level for the work they’re producing as an artist in residence at Open Studio.
Fall 2021-Spring 2022
Sketchbook drawing of intended project
Open Studio: Hexagon Residency
MacNeil was awarded the Hexagon Mid-Career Artist Member Residency at Open Studio in Toronto, Ontario. During their residency, MacNeil will be producing a series of etchings that examine and critique the spaces of institutionalized healthcare.
august 2021
Photophobia: Contemporary moving image festival
K. MacNeil and Zhang Yang had their collaborative video piece, Cartography, featured during Photophobia in early August.
Photophobia 2021 is the 15th annual festival of short-format contemporary media, film, video and moving image hosted in partnership between the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Hamilton Artists Inc. Established in 1999, Photophobia was Hamilton’s first film and video festival dedicated to experimental time-based media at a time when there were no such platforms in the Hamilton community. Not limited by restrictions or themes, Photophobia showcases creative, unconventional and experimental approaches to contemporary time-based media.
Front cover
Summer 2020
Past Lives: Collaborative with Risolve
Past Lives is a collaborative book featuring 36 different artists, curated and managed by Henry Gepfer. This book project was put together as a way to help support artists affected by the COVID-19 shutdown. All of the artists responded to the prompt of Past Lives, reflecting on the past and present during a worldwide pandemic.
The book is printed using a hybrid mix of Risograph duplicator ink in various colors and Riso ComColor Inkjet.
Risolve Studio is donating all of the paper, printing, and time to produce these books. Hallagan Business Machines and Office Supplies generously donated the Riso ink and consumables.
70% of the gross sales are being distributed equally among the book's contributing artists. The remaining 30% will be donated to The Loveland Foundation, who is committed to showing up for communities of color in unique and powerful ways, with a particular focus on Black women and girls.
More information on the product, including the full list of artists participating, found here.
Spring 2020
The Print Center: Awagami Paper Award
The Awagami Paper Award (100 sheets of Awagami Editioning Paper, valued at $500) was awarded to K MacNeil, as a Semi-Finalist in the 94th Annual International Competition at the Print Center (Philadelphia, PA).
See the full announcement here.
The 94th ANNUAL International Competition can be found here.
Winter 2019/2020
Mid-America Print Council Journal: volume 28/29 - the membership edition
Curated and selected by guest editor Jean Dibble, Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. Dibble writes:
”In Vicious Cycle, Kate MacNeil performs the visualization of internal and external traumatic experiences. Using the tools of printmaking, Kate transfers the impressions left on her body by ink on a copper plate she deliberately smears onto her hands and arms, so that she can impress them onto a clean copper plate by viciously attacking it.
”The structure of the video is shown on two side-by-side screens so that there is a break between the ink being picked up, and the damage inflicted on the plate.
”The visual break and the variable action between the two screens allows the viewer to understand that there are connections, but that the connections are not easy to declare as solid truth.
”The slipperiness of the presentation mirrors the fact that things happen; but direct proof of cause and effect, of memories failings, and of damages unseen, highlights the real difficulties that exist in human lives.
”The visual structure of the video underscores the lasting damage of trauma, and the difficulty of connecting the events of trauma to the outcomes of trauma.”
Fall 2019
Semi-Finalist in the Print Center’s 94th International Annual Competition
Curated by Charlotte Cotton and Gretchen Wagner.
View the full announcement here.
Summer 2019
Foundwork Guest Curators:
Selected by Rachel Adams
Rachel Adams:
”Kate MacNeil intertwines a variety of media in order to examine themes including trauma, memory and loss. Through her performative mark-making, Kate imprints onto surfaces, using her body in ways to speak through the messiness of life. While recently working through confronting the silencing of traumatic events and mental health issues, Kate’s work is a powerful reminder that abstraction is an artistic tool that can speak volumes."
Summer 2018
Charleston City Paper: Kate MacNeil’s Redux show confronts the aftermath of trauma
“What does it mean to remain? Who are we after the storm, after the love affair, after the political upset?
After the defining moment, what defines us?”
Spring 2018
Carlos Llobet and Kate MacNeil at WNYBAC
“Maybe there’s a scientific name for it—though probably not—the phenomenon—as notably in the initial intensity stages of being in love—of not being able to clearly recollect—despite all efforts and exertions—the face of the absent beloved. “Clearly” being the operative word. Not by any means a total failure to recall what she or he looks like. Not that you might not recognize him or her on subsequent actual encounter. Nothing like that. But instead of an integral and precise mental image of the loved one, a patchwork of partial images, incomplete, and unsatisfactory. But not just a loved one in a romantic sense, but anyone deeply beloved. Or anything similarly cared for, or cared about. A place, a time, a moment. Artists Carlos Llobet and Kate MacNeil explore the phenomenon in an exhibit currently at the Western New York Book Arts Center. Entitled I’m trying to remember, pero nunca olvidaré.” - Jack Foran
Winter/Spring 2018
Third Place Prize - Print Austin: The contemporary Print
“Kate MacNeil’s wall-size sectioned Intaglio, Untitled (The Void), transcends the gallery space, becoming a vortex of ink, displaying and enveloping you in the artifacts of time.”
- Elvia Perrin, Director, Print Austin
Winter 2015/2016
international print center new york
commedia: new prints 2015/autumn
Juried by Tomas Vu Daniel. On view November 19, 2015- January 16, 2016.
spring 2015
Honorable Mention - ArtFields
Selected as one of ten honorable mentions from 400 exhibiting artists.