IAN MACKAY
SENSE AND NON-SENSE
NOVEMBER 5 - NOVEMBER 29
RECEPTION: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1 - 5 PM
Buffer, 2014,
Oil on wood, 12” x 24”
The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present SENSE AND NON-SENSE by Ian Mackay.
SENSE AND NON-SENSE takes it cue from the shared practice of Sophie Tauber and Hans Arp. Employing Trompe-l'œil, It involves a deconstructive play with opposites. Building on the explorations of Dadaist abstraction, Mackay works from still-life tableaux built for their formal and signifying potential where one term may oppose another. Order may contain the random, material surface can be read as illusory depth, the emblematic is made banal.
Hesitating between the representational and the abstract, Mackay’s paintings recall the flat patterns of ornament yet maintain a concrete and tactile presence. His work frustrates our usual model of meaning and points to another kind of logic, a sense of things that are “neither this nor that” but also “both-and”.
Mackay's choices, however, infer a socio-political reading. Organizing discards and ephemera of an old material world into models of information structures, Mackay points at our relationship to the concrete that is ceding to its digital simulation, rendering us distracted from the real just as it needs our attention.
Ian Mackay is a Canadian artist living in Toronto where he maintains his studio. He completed his BFA at OCAD University in 2009.
