McBride told me that she photographed the uninhabited apartment interiors, largely empty city streets, and arcade games she portrays in her work. Siobhan McBride, “Five Doors” (2022), acrylic gouache, paint marker, and colored pencil on paper on panel, 18 inches x 24 inches The views are mysterious and even unsettling. She depicts spaces as partially enclosed and blocked, and on some level unknowable, which are combined with abstract silhouettes with intricate edges that read as an oddly lit aerial view of a tree’s leaves in “Lantern Fly Graveyard,” for example, or as crisp, ominous shadows cast by architectural details in “Jongno-gu Night Walk” (both 2022). The paintings are full of off-kilter details, resulting from her use of simple abstract shapes, mostly rectangles, in ways that are not immediately readable. McBride works in acrylic gouache, matte acrylics, paint marker, and colored pencils on paper mounted on pencil. According to the press release, “Siobhan McBride was born in Seoul, South Korea, and adopted to Queens, NY, as an infant” and some of the work had to do with “searching for her biological identity in Korea.” Together with the formal elements, these different pieces of information made me want to discover whether the 12 mid-sized paintings in the exhibition were as interesting as I intuited. Although I first looked at the works on my computer, other aspects I found intriguing were the interplay between flat areas of color and three-dimensional space, the odd evening or artificial light, and her interest in solid and transparent surfaces, reflection and form, and sharp-edged silhouettes. The barriers and the space beyond them, along with the nearly enclosed spaces in each of her paintings, seem to be central to their subject matter. In fact, spatially they appear very different than most photo-based realist paintings, which tend to flatten the scene. While I deduced that McBride’s paintings were based on photographs, they are not photorealist. As if to reinforce my sense that the work was about change and feeling out of sync with one’s surroundings, I learned that on January 1, 2023, the gallery had changed its name to Long Story Short NYC. It was the in-between visual states and contrasts of dark and light, as well as my curiosity about the links between the paintings’ subject matter and the artist’s biography, that prompted me to visit the exhibition Siobhan McBride: Never Means Always Not, at Another Gallery (December 16, 2022–January 8, 2023), curated by Stavroula Coulianidis.

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