Words Fest – Day & McLean
In collaboration with Words Fest join us for a conversation, both in-person and online, with Susan Day & Jason McLean
@ Michael Gibson Gallery on Friday, November 10 at 7pm
To get your ticket to attend the event in person, please sign up HERE.
If you can’t join us in person, you can watch the conversation live on zoom. Register for the zoom HERE.
For the month of November, Susan Day and Jason McLean will be exhibiting together in a show titled “Transfer Station”. Though working in completely different mediums, Day & McLean are good friends who both use figuration and line in their artwork. Community and their local environment are main themes for both as well as connection to ones personal history. During the conversation they will discuss their artwork and talk about their connection, both in art and in life.
Susan Day has an extensive exhibition and installation history as an artist working in ceramic, straddling the worlds of fine art and contemporary craft. In earlier works she has used the material qualities of clay (simultaneously soft and malleable and at times fragile and breakable) to expose the vulnerabilities of the body. Recently, she has used more oblique references to the body, drawing connections to nature and identity in large scale architectural installations. Through this work, she has experienced the power of public (or public facing) art to create meeting places and instil pride and ownership in neighbourhoods and places where communities meet. This work embellishes surfaces in lived environments with relevant, important and provocative content and is the work she wants to pursue.
Jason McLean’s drawings, paintings and sculptures are idiosyncratic visual records of his experiences, observations and perceptions. His frenetic artworks include rich annotations and carefully-researched fragments of personal and social histories. McLean’s drawings act as rhizomatic diaries that pictorially represent his relationship with local environments. His works are often described as mental maps, where samplings of his daily observations are mashed-up into antiheroic, yet poignant combinations. Working in this way, McLean uses humour to touch upon challenging subject matter, such as sadness, loss, displacement, mental illness and economic hardship.