Neil McClelland: Bright Black Starry Sunny Night
to
Xchanges Artists' Gallery and Studios 6E-2333 Government Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8T 4P4
Neil McClelland, "The Irrational World of Trees," 2020
oil on canvas, 57 1/4" x 76 1/2"
Opening Sept 9 (7-9 pm) and artist talk Sept 24 at 2 pm
In Bright Black Starry Sunny Night, Neil McClelland takes his childhood home as a starting point for considering ideas of place, home, belonging, transformation, and human relationships to nature and the cosmos. In these paintings, he seeks to create a fictional place of deep beauty but also of tension and uncertainty in which anything might happen. Night skies imbue this imagined world with a sense of isolation and magnitude, an opening of the cosmos beyond what a farmyard scene might ordinarily suggest. The mundane and the sublime, the uncanny and the familiar, desire and dread collide within this place that he represents as a microcosm of the world falling apart but also of nature not only enduring but bursting forth. Each return (both physically and through the practice of painting) back home to the Gatineau Hills of Quebec from where he now lives out west adds another layer of experience. Through painting processes that emphasize ambiguity, motion, and change, he hopes to create for the viewer perceptions of place and time that are unmoored and indeterminate and a sense of mystery, unease and wonder. Through painting, McClelland attempts to grasp the contradictions and ambiguities that pervade our lives at a time of upheaval, uncertainty, and planetary precariousness. He understands his paintings as spaces filled with possibilities, defamiliarized but somewhere where we might find something of ourselves and our world.
Neil McClelland lives in Victoria where he teaches art at Vancouver Island School of Art and at the University of Victoria. He received his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2014 and has had solo and group exhibitions in BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. His paintings are in private and public collections including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Colart Collection. He is a 2016 and 2020 grantee of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation which supported the making of this body of work. https://www.elizabethgreenshieldsfoundation.org