Casey McGlynn: The Journey the Meeting the Destination

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Casey McGlynn, "If an Asteroid Falls to Earth This Horse Grows Wings," 2019

mixed media on canvas, 48" x 72"

CASEY MCGLYNN  The Journey the Meeting the Destination

UPPER GALLERY Artist Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2-4 pm

The Journey the Meeting the Destination is a visual open journal by Canadian interdisciplinary artist Casey McGlynn, whose latest body of work is a rueful meditation on the past 20-odd years of his life and career. Featuring the artist's distinct and multilayered horse studies-cum-interior cartography, this exhibition also marks the McGlynn’s return to his herd series, the frequent subject now imbued with renewed symbolic potency.

At once a personal reckoning with the inevitable passage of time and his own reluctant maturation, McGlynn’s canvasses also function as fragmented musings on our contemporary anxieties and the intense precarity of our crisis-ridden times. The understated poignancy of “Leaving Toronto After 25 Years” succinctly captures the artist's critical stance, as McGlynn dwells on eras ended and pasts to be lost, and documents his own attempts to navigate the uncertain present with humor and stylistic verve.

With a recurring pantheon of characters and motifs from McGlynn’s ever-growing, pop-culture-influenced personal mythology — extant forms of his youth at play with spectres of a more immediate past — McGlynn narrates our collective coping. Forcefully expressive, profoundly honest, and wildly irreverent, the raw poeticism of McGlynn’s compositions honor the trials and tribulations of lived experience and evoke a visual catharsis, as he casts a perversely hopeful eye to the future at hand.

McGlynn’s works can be found in a number of private and public collections in both Canada and the US. Most recently his work was acquired for the HBC Global Art Collection in New York.