Caitlin MacBride: The Floor Below The Floor

“I could start by talking about the grid, or the flatbed picture plane, or the archive, or I could start with the first floor I knew. To the side of the kitchen was a built-in desk. Below it was a small door in the floor. First was the inset hatch door made to match our gray 1980s linoleum floor. If you opened that layer, you’d discover that below it was another removable hatch made from a previous floor, a red, yellow, and blue polka dot–painted floor from the ’50s. When you removed that there was just one wood board across a hole with no perceivable bottom. Then a well lined with stones leading into a dark bottomless hole. A cylindrical portal that went into the center of the house.” – Caitlin MacBride

Deanna Evans Projects is pleased to present “The Floor Below the Floor”, a solo exhibition of new works by Caitlin MacBride, her second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from September 1 to September 26, 2026 at 370 Broadway on the second floor with an opening reception on Friday, September 4th from 6-8pm.

In “The Floor Below The Floor”, Caitlin MacBride focuses on the hidden structures that shape both objects and histories. Drawing from research in museum collections and archives, the exhibition examines how acts of preservation, documentation, repair, and construction determine what survives and how it is understood.

This new work focuses on wood and cloth with attention paid to their construction—sewn and built. Floors, walls, windows, quilts, and architectural elements reveal shared systems of making—surfaces assembled through grids, seams, joints, and repetitive acts of labor. The picture plane shifts back and forth between horizontal and vertical surfaces. Following a research fellowship at the Winterthur Museum focused on colonial textiles, tools, and architectural elements, MacBride began considering the place where object and process meet. A maker’s knowledge of structure and response to a cloth’s composition, texture, transparency and previous purpose parallel the construction of a painting itself. Through rubbing, sanding, glazing, and repeated revisions, a painting becomes a record of labor.

MacBride’s sustained interest in wood similarly reflects its capacity for transformation. These concerns resonate with the Shaker belief that making serves as both a utilitarian need and way of giving praise. In a series of smaller wood relief works, the artist explores the material possibilities through processes of burning, cutting, carving, and inlay. Wood exists simultaneously as structure and surface and can reflect both intentional building and the wear of time. These works also employ silver coat, an aluminum and asphalt paint used to protect metal roofs.

Rather than treat a painting solely as a vehicle for representation, MacBride approaches it as a material object whose physical construction parallels that of the artifacts she studies. Layers of oil paint are rubbed back, sanded, glazed, and rebuilt, so that each work records its own process of making. Trompe l’oeil effects play with the history of both historical decorative painting and the conservation techniques employed by museums. In this way, the paintings occupy a space of both image and object, where depiction and material presence continually inform one another.

MacBride expands her relationship with museum documentation photos, including elements of archival record keeping, such as color checker cards and rulers. She also works from her photos of the objects at Winterthur and the Shaker Museum in their archival boxes and storage settings. Objects represented throughout the exhibition originate from the collections of the Winterthur Museum, the Shaker Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Displayed alongside the paintings is a table of tools from the artist’s personal collection—objects she affectionately refers to as her muses. The presentation blurs the lines between a worktable and museum display table, complicating the value assigned through memory, labor, and use. Some of the tools have deep familial meaning, others are ones that just sparked an interest. MacBride comes from a family of collectors, and many of them are gifts. The boundaries between archiving, collecting, and hoarding engage questions of class distinctions, attachment, and obsession.

Throughout the exhibition, MacBride returns to the ways museums frame American history while also tracing her own early experiences of making. She draws on her earliest memories—growing up in an early American house that was being gut renovated and seeing the walls built from the inside out, from studs to wallpaper. With these paintings, MacBride considers the history of re-purposing and revision on both an institutional and personal level via the objects that persist. Through historical research and studio practice, MacBride examines what it is to be an active participant in what is preserved, demolished, or rebuilt.