Opens Friday, May 1st, 6pm – 9pm
On View May 1st – 31st
Gallery hours: Saturday & Sunday 2pm – 6pm
For the month of May, Pink Noise Projects will debut 4:5, a new series of paintings by Philadelphia-based artist Macy West.
Artist Statement
4:5 is a new collection of paintings considering the shorthand, diagramming, and notation that accompanies notetaking and sorting of information. I’m fascinated with perception, how we move through the world with physical bodies, how our bodies mediate our experience, and how we develop additional mediators, symbols, and signals to communicate with each other. Developed within the aesthetic parameters of the notebook, each painting relies on the repetition of form and mark. The grid, the crop, and the mask are recurring compositional strategies which reference ideation, speculation, and learning. The paintings are only 10 x 12.5 inches each, maintaining my preferred 4:5 ratio at the scale of the page.
These works respond to my own need to work through information in my studio, to prepare again and again, to edit, revise, measure, scale up, scale down, transpose, translate, cut, paste, and rotate as I try to make sense of experience: perpetual motion, the passage of time, the constant stream of images, the torrent of news, and the influx of sensory information more generally. For 4:5, many of the paintings begin with a screenprint which, like a notebook, contains and sequences the content, the image on the canvas. The structure is a primary assumption accepted to receive the meaning, which excludes as much as it organizes. My perpetual impulse toward change prevents me from flattening ideas into a single image.
The paintings reference the need for a key or an interpreter when engaging with the generated abstractions.Their meaning exists in their impenetrability, their sense of organization without understanding. They are fragmented in a way that reminds us of breakdown in communication, and the limits of human knowledge. What does it mean to know part of something? How much knowledge is required for understanding? When does position fail to provide context, but instead dilute meaning?
Artist Bio
Macy West is a Philly-based painter and art educator making work exploring artistic and scientific visualization. In 2021 Macy completed her BFA in Studio Arts from Louisiana State University where she concentrated in Biological Sciences, exploring the intersection of art and science for visual communication. From 2021-2023, Macy taught high school art and physics at a private school in Covington, Louisiana, an experience which reinforced the importance of communication and learning to her artistic practice. Macy received her MFA Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA in May 2025. She is the co-editor of SENSUS Magazine.
Pink Noise Projects 