Opening Reception: Saturday, November 22, 2008, 5-8pm @ the Coop, 1108 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94103

Leigh McCarthy’s critically lauded solo exhibition, “In Search of the Miraculous” took place at the Coop in San Francisco.

The exhibition’s title was based on a triptych by Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch artist who embarked on a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 12 foot sailboat. Six months after he set sail in 1975, his boat was found off the coast of Ireland — but he himself had vanished without a trace.

McCarthy’s exhibition sought not to treat this incident, or this artist directly — but rather to evoke the yearning for the sublime that lay at the heart of his journey, and others like it. A constellation of stand-alone pieces, together McCarthy’s art became an exploration of outsized ambition and ineffable disaster. One could not help but have the sense of having stumbled across jetsam, haphazardly washed ashore; each fragment suggested an unfathomable history, and what beauty there was (and there was beauty) was sea-battered and storm-tossed, a beauty that had emerged only through trials untold.

These pieces, as is the case with all of McCarthy’s work, display a highly refined aesthetic, and one that embraces the process of decaying pigments. McCarthy’s pieces also explore negative space, suggesting that what is not there can be as evocative as what is: stories untold; disasters unrecorded; pitfalls unseen. Once called a “romantic conceptualist,” McCarthy here explores one of the subjects closest to her heart: the unspeakable tenderness of failure.

McCarthy lives and works in San Francisco. Group exhibitions and projects include Triple Base Gallery, San Francisco (2009), Getty Center, Los Angeles (2008/2006), L.A.C.E., Los Angeles (2006), and Anna Helwing Gallery, Culver City (2005).

Click here for the review in the San Francisco Chronicle by Reyhan Harmanci.