Andrew James McKay | Normalizations

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“Normalizations,” 2024

(design by Kyle Stewart) (courtesy of the artist)

Opening reception: November 2nd, 2-4PM

NORMALIZATIONS

It must've borne repeated mention because it kept coming up: the paintings seemed to have a beginning and an end. I wondered at intervals if I'd been containing the audience by having so clearly delineated the two points, irrespective of whether I'd done it intentionally or not. And besides, shouldn't a painting always have those mysterious traits of being eternal and infinite? The consumer today, of images or of other things, does prefer that consumables somehow be everything to everyone.

But actually, the people who have taken the time to note this A to B—aren't wrong. Like all situations and phenomena if we're to be honest, the pictures of course start and finish. This, both in terms of the literal making of them as objects, and in terms of how they are necessarily read. We live in a distinctly ahistorical time but only so much can be done about this.

I'm trying to make pictures that are concerned with my own experience about the time in which I live and work. A lot of painting, especially figurative painting, is bogged down with nostalgia—references to historical images now haggard for having been so often pointed to, or otherwise under the spell of a fanciful sense of the 'good old days.' Even worse but no less critically, we also contend with a proliferation of images crippled by a cynicism about what the future holds: please no more pictures of looming spectres and unknown crises! For good measure, probably not a bad idea to also dispose of wistful images, cinematic images (these oily reproductions of film stills are never of contemporary superhero movies but rather are evocative of a 'certain era,' aren't they?), and the images crammed with hollowed-out and false romanticism.

Are sincere images possible now? Can one make an image with forthrightness, conscientiousness, and an honesty that doesn't demand either the maker or viewer or both recede from the reality in which we must exist? Are these those images?

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My work is an exploration of the relationship(s) between the component and the whole. That is to say: What are the individual and specific details of the life we experience? How do we record and arrange those details to make a work which can tell of that experience? What are the compositions of our communities as far as the relation of the individual to the collective experience?

Andrew James McKay is a graduate of the honours arts programme at Emily Carr University of Art+Design. In 2019 he became the first student in the history of that institution to be awarded upon graduation the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Inclusion, Democracy and Reconciliation. A three-time recipient of grant support from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, his work has been exhibited with Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Ground Floor Art Centre, Vancouver; Peter Ohler's Fine Art, Toronto; and Masters Gallery, Calgary.

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