Christina McPhee’s 2026 installation for MCASB consists of graphical scores in the form of large scale drawings, on unframed washi papers, closely hung together like sheets or scrims in vertical drop, in the unconventional space of a nearly hidden classroom. Diagramming Sentences involves a working method of ‘reverse illumination’ — texts enter the drawing as a result of improvisations based on sets of minimal notes or directions, influenced by masters of Fluxus like Yoko Ono, and the inventor of ‘deep listening,’ Pauline Oliveros. Processing many variations of syntax and scale, the drawings unfurl poetry like spells, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in seventeenth century Mexico City to Joan Naviyuk Kane in twenty-first century Alaska. 

The installation also includes animated video based on eighteen months in the artist’s drawing shed, montaged to ‘Mirrors,’ a new work by California-based composer Julie Herndon (2025). "Christina McPhee says her drawings are ‘made as a site for figuring out the incommensurate and infinitely parsed movements in vision.’ I’ve no doubt that she knows what this means, but it doesn’t give away how she arrives at her delicate, intelligent skeins of line, algebraic figures and shaped textures, nor clarify what appears to be the mapping of a mass of green organic matter onto a tangle of blood-red smoke. Those are the secrets of her practice, amping up the intrigue of her method." - Lane Barden, Artillery Magazine, 2024. 

Drawing is moving: she wants back inside the classroom, she wants to disrupt and enchant. “As a child, from time to time, you stay late in the classroom, after school. You have to write a sentence on the blackboard, on repeat, for fifteen minutes: "I will not talk in class." You watch your hand, writing, big forms in gray on black, line by unequal line. Repeat, love its curves, vary its dots and dashes, let it distract you. Keep going… Drawing sentences from shapes of text, letters go flying like paper airplanes...lines scatter into star charts… listen through your hands.” — Christina McPhee