"Who’s Really in Control (detail)"
Chad Jacklin, "Who’s Really in Control (detail)," 2008, mixed media and found objects.
CHAD JACKLIN, Dioramas
Mysteria Gallery, Regina
September 3 to November 8, 2008
By Patricia Robertson
Chad Jacklin likes to play mad scientist in his Regina studio. The artist’s chosen medium, found art, makes a clear statement about consumerism, outmoded technology and junk. The materials for his salvaged artwork are all destined for the garbage heap. He explains that he’s interested in giving value to the formerly useless. Jacklin, who is self-taught, has been “making stuff” since he was 12 or 13, when he built lawn furniture and sold it to his suburban Regina neighbours. “I also made a go-cart that was so enormous it wouldn’t fit out of the backyard,” he jokes. Who’s in Control Here?, his work for the Mysteria GalleryDioramas show, is fashioned from a 1950s-era ham radio set. “There are all of these tubes and gauges and knobs,” he explains. “When you turn the knobs, they don’t work. Inside the piece are rabbits in lab coats who are actually in control. It’s my comment on the modern workplace. I meet so many people these days and they’re not doing what they want to be doing. We’ve let technology kind of sneak in, and it’s always sold as the next best thing. But it’s overtaken our lives and it’s distracting us.”
Represented by: Mysteria Gallery, Regina