The featured exhibit runs August 1 – 31, 2024 in Metro Gallery in the Garneau Theatre lobby.⁠

 

Artist Reception: August 3 at 2:00 pm

 

Artist: Neil McClelland

 

Artist Statement:

These paintings take as their starting point my childhood home. This place where I grew up becomes an imagined world, acting as a metaphor for the belonging that we seek within nature and the cosmos. My process involves layering fragments of visual experience, memory and imagination to create in-between places that are not so much about representing a real place but rather distilling it in a search for meaning. As in much of my work, there is recognition of the tensions between the uncertainties of our times and the possibilities for re-enchantment with the world and a planetary consciousness. I seek to capture a sense of uneasiness and precariousness but also a sense of awe and wonder at the interconnectedness of everything: land and sky, earth and cosmos, night and day, and past/present/future. Painting processes that emphasize ambiguity, motion, and transformation work to convey a visceral and unmoored sense of place and time and to suggest what is simultaneously familiar but strange. In this dream-like world, time bends and blurs, land shifts and moves, the uncanny and the everyday collide, and anything might happen. Night skies, or skies in which time is indeterminate, imbue this imagined place with a sense of magnitude, an opening of the cosmos, a space to contemplate. I understand the places in my paintings as filled with possibilities, defamiliarized but somewhere where we might find something of ourselves and our world.

 

Originally from Quebec, Neil McClelland divides his time between his home and studio in Edmonton, Alberta and Victoria, BC. He received his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2014, and he currently teaches visual arts for Thompson Rivers University. Neil has had solo and group exhibitions in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, and he is a 2016 and 2020 grantee of the internationally prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. His paintings are in collections including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Colart Collection.