Jason McLean at McIntosh Gallery
Jason McLean: if you could read my mind
McIntosh Gallery, UWO
September 27 – November 3, 2012
Jason McLean: if you could read my mind includes 57 works completed since the artist returned to London, Ontario after living in Vancouver and Toronto and traveling extensively in North America and Europe. These drawings, paintings and sculptures form an idiosyncratic visual record of his experiences and perceptions, which, as the artist puts it, act as “a rhizomatic diary that pictorially represents my relationship with local environments.” McLean’s chronic mapping captures, with dazzling vertigo, his restless movements through an ever-changing terrain of cultural and social relations. Everything from fragments of popular culture to quotidian experiences appears in these immersive works.
The exhibition catalogue, designed by London artist Marc Bell, includes essays by David Liss, Sarah Milroy and Christina Walde. This exhibition commemorates the 100th anniversary of H. B. Beal Secondary School, where McLean studied art prior to attending the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Many distinguished Canadian artists have graduated from the Bealart program, including Greg Curnoe, Robert Fones, Wyn Geleynse, Jamelie Hassan, Ed Pien and film director Paul Haggis, who won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards in 2004 for Crash.
Since leaving Beal, McLean has exhibited often, including projects at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles and ABEL Neue Kunst, Berlin. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto and Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
More information www.mcintoshgallery.ca