Myfanwy MacLeod: Not Just the Good Old Boys
Myfanwy MacLeod Hex III 2009 / photo Scott Massey
Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod has an uncanny knack for upending the status quo sensibilities of both popular and high culture. This practice continues in “Gold,” a solo exhibition of MacLeod’s newest work currently on view at Catriona Jeffries. Expanding on her satirical “monument to alcoholism” that debuted earlier this year in the National Gallery of Canada’s showing of Vancouver art, “Nomads,” MacLeod presents an array of sculpture, painting and photography that casts a wry eye on the “drunken” legacies of modernism. The exhibition’s centrepiece, Everything seems empty without you, reworks a classic backwoods moonshine still into a parody of minimalist formalism. (The romantic modernist narrative fuelled by hard-drinking, hard-thinking male artists would also seem to be in for a drubbing.) A suite of seven “hex” paintings set the mythological, setting the colourful geometric patterns of traditional Amish good luck symbols against the modern mysticism of conceptual approaches to painting by Sol LeWitt and company. Similarly, MacLeod’s large painting Ain’t nothing ever happened suggests the female collective labour of quilting traditions as a counterpoint to the heroic lineage of abstraction. (274 E 1st Ave, Vancouver BC)
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Myfanwy MacLeod Everything seems empty without you 2009 / photo Scott Massey |
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Myfanwy MacLeod Ain't nothing ever happened 2009 / photo Scott Massey |
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