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Our Glass Paradise Revisited
13 March - 5 April 2020
Join Artist Neil McClelland for a virtual visit to The Chapel Gallery!
Artist Statement
My paintings engage with process and mark making, narrative and symbol, and darkness and light. The work explores notions of place, the search for paradises on earth, and human relationships to nature, pulling out tensions and contradictions to create a utopian/dystopian sensibility. I engage with the idea of “no places,” sites that somehow connect to the search for the utopic, for the “good place” that doesn’t really exist. These no places reflect both a yearning for perfect happiness and the illusory nature of the paradises we seek. My process involves not so much recording places but rather distilling them in a search for meaning. These are my preoccupations as I develop an iconography that suggests broader societal and environmental themes while drawing from my own experiences of place. I seek to connect the personal, the local and the global as I explore time and place, loss and rebirth, desire and dread. As in dreams, images of place accumulate, merge, and transform in ways that defamiliarize and make strange but that also suggest a symbolic significance. My paintings are rooted in memory, family history, fragments of visual experience, and storytelling to create a fictitious place but one in which we might find something of ourselves and our world.
With the series of tondo paintings, I seek to evoke a sense of reflection, solitude and silence within an imagined escape into nature. The mood is quiet, slow, contemplative. Yet, there is tension and a sense of unease. What we seek, we can sometimes only watch from afar. The paintings suggest viewing landscapes through lenses that try to overcome the distance.
Artist Biography
Neil McClelland is originally from the Gatineau Hills in Quebec and now lives in Victoria, BC where he received his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2014. He teaches drawing and painting at the Vancouver Island School of Art and is a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria. He has had solo and group exhibitions in BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Neil is a 2016 and 2020 grantee of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
website: https://neilmcclelland.com