Taree Mackenzie was born in 1980 in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.
Taree Mackenzie’s visually intriguing perceptual experiences contain the air of early modernist films and the simplicity of physics experiments. Mixing coloured lights like a painter mixes pigment, she creates quasi-scientific experiments that render grounded alchemical results. She says of her practice that she aims to “inspire a sense of wonder and surprise by prompting the viewer out of their habitual way of looking.” Alongside Op Art, Mackenzie’s work is significantly indebted to 1960’s American minimalism. This includes the Light and Space movement from the West Coast, whose legacy is most apparent in her site-specific installations that explore the basic principles of CMY colour mixing, recalling the coloured ‘atmospheres’ of James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. However, if the West Coast version of minimalism leaned towards the spiritual and transcendental, then Mackenzie’s attitude is perhaps more in tune with the functionality of East Coast minimalism and its dedication to calling attention to the unadorned materiality of an artwork.
