Winter Street Gallery is pleased to present Shifting Infinite, an exhibition of ten new paintings by Quentin James McCaffrey. Within intricately detailed domestic interiors, McCaffrey explores personal and historical narratives, drawing together representations of objects, decor, and luxuriant oil paintings from memory to create deliberately calibrated mise en scènes. In McCaffrey's endeavor to “use the domestic interior as the location of introspection,” mirrors, paintings, and windows offer lenses via which shifting narratives and perspectives become infinite. 

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Using a soft color palette and uniformly small scale, McCaffrey’s works invoke a sense of nostalgia and familiarity. At the same time, the formal arrangement of objects, plants, light, and shadow are of utmost consideration as the artist transforms the commonplace into something sacred. A preoccupation with domestic interiors and the still life is embedded within the art historical lexicon, and one might recall the Dutch interior paintings of the 17th century as a leading example. Whereas historically this subject matter was ubiquitous as a symbol of class and society, McCaffrey’s work removes any specific identification. Mirrors deny any reflection of human figures, revealing the artist’s implicit understanding of these spaces as psychological: environments for contemplation, mediation, and introspection. 

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Quentin James McCaffrey received a BA from Taylor University in Upland, Indiana in 2009 and an MFA from The New York Academy of Art in 2011. He attended The Macedonia Institute Residency in 2022 and was a recipient of The 2020 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. His works have been presented at Ochi Projects, Los Angeles; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Marlborough Gallery, New York; and 1969 Gallery, New York, as well as elsewhere in the United States. McCaffrey lives and works in New York.

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