Studio hours by appointment only Cell: 757-620-6402 Instagram: oonaghdanaan mixed media
Corey McGinnis was trained as an oil painter. She attended Wake Forest University as an Eleanor Layfield-Davis scholarship recipient for Visual Arts. There, she attained her undergraduate degrees: a double major in Anthropology and Fine Art. After graduating from college, Corey sojourned and camped throughout Alaska, British Columbia and the west coast of the United States on what can only be described as an authentic Beatnik Pilgrimage. Upon returning to Virginia, Corey worked as a Kindergarten teacher at a small, private Quaker school. After bearing three sons and beginning to grow a family, she returned to the Quaker school as an art teacher, instructing students ages pre-K through high school in painting, drawing, ceramics and mixed media. After her children were school age, Corey received her graduate degree in Counseling. She currently makes her living as a counselor, but keeps a private studio for her work as a painter and mixed media artist. Corey was steeped in Abstract Expressionist roots, drawing much of her influences from artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Willem de Kooning. Although trained in oils, Corey became accustomed to utilizing caulking, shoe polish, floor adhesive, wood stain, textiles, found and organic objects with traditional oil paints. She purposefully juxtaposes chemical compositions and allows the substances to resist, absorb or respond to one another on a given surface.. Corey is fascinated by raw industrial spaces where peeling paint, iron stains and graffiti layer and create their own visual entities. Corey is equally inspired by organic and naturally occurring patterns in nature, and the breakdown and natural decomposition which occurs in both industrial and pastoral environs. For the group show, “A Space of Her Own”, Corey's muse is Anne Hamilton, a multi-media artist who emerged on the art scene in the 1980’s. In her blog post, “If I Were A Man”, feminist writer Rebecca Solnit discusses the space and roles of women living in a male-created world. She references Anne Hamilton’s work in term of the space Anne utilizes: “ Ann Hamilton has had a tremendous career, and some of it came from the sheer scale and ambition of her work from the outset, which seemed exceptional when she appeared on the art scene in the late 1980s. I remember all the women art students I met in that era, who made tiny, furtive things that expressed something about their condition, including the lack of room they felt free to occupy. How do you think big when you’re supposed to not get in the way, not overstep your welcome, not overshadow or intimidate?” (Solnit, 2017). Both Anne Hamilton and Magdalena Abakanowicz inspire Corey in that these daring women continuously push boundaries in terms of unapologetically occupying space. As a sage older woman, one thing Corey will continue to proselytize to younger women is to be absolutely robust in their presence, to express ownership, to reclaim their territory, proudly occupying their birth rites as equal, spiritual sojourners, stakeholders in the dividends and blessings of our planet, galaxy, consciousness. Women must not yield power and must never consent to containment.