MacKinnon embraces metaphor

Studio 21 also exhibiting its regular Acadie show

By ELISSA BARNARD Arts Reporter | At The Galleries

GLEN MACKINNON takes his art beyond technique into the magical land of metaphor in a new solo show at Studio 21.

MacKinnon, an Alberta artist and NSCAD graduate, carves, gouges and burrows into wood, then sands and paints the surfaces for exciting voyages into texture with flat surfaces of smooth monotones of red, black and white and whorls of wood like gouged-out polka dots.

This series is about his fascination for both road patterns and the sky.

The Day and Night series, of pure sky divided in half, is mystical and lovely. In Day and Night III, the carved pits become stars in a night sky that blurs into a pale blue daytime sky of painted, raised white circles.

MacKinnon, in halving the board into two sides and playing with the number and type of carved dots, creates symmetry and a dissonance.

He captures the mysterious time between day and night. He suggests a presence and an absence of light and being.

The road series is less mystical but compelling in patterns and recognition as MacKinnon carves out interchanges, and in Road Drawing, signs of a red cross, a continuous infinity loop and a sort of Band-Aid suggesting more than just roads.

The oil and relief carving Cloverleaf is a simple pattern of a deep red line with a side circle cut deeply and cleanly into the wood and repeated in four squares to create a new pattern like a mandala. The simple graphic cut wood mass of underpasses and overpasses and circles in Interchange is a fascinating study in lines and a wonderfully clear work.

"For this exhibition, I am looking both up and down; up into the atmosphere and down on the highways and roads," says MacKinnon, who has taught at the University of Lethbridge since 1998.

"I am interested in contrasts: light and dark, day and night, nature and the natural world mediated by human involvement. The material, Baltic birch plywood, offers possibilities for both sculpture and image. When sanded, gouged or otherwise carved, its layers reveal lines that describe the topography of the removal. I associate this process with drawing."

Studio 21’s regular Acadie show features the return of popular artists Francis Coutellier, Raymond Martin, Romeo Savoie and Yvon Gallant, each working in a signature style.
Martin and Gallant are the storytellers using folk art idioms to talk about everyday life. Gallant’s black-outlined, faceless figures express themselves through gesture and accessories. Martin’s red-outlined animals and people are tiny, often comical creations in a vast universe.

Gallant’s world is the small town. In this show, he depicts people charmingly at tea time and less charmingly outside the hospital having a smoke and attached to a standing IV tube.

Martin’s geese are headed like torpedoes for the south, while below diners feast with the seagulls at a wharfside cafe in Le Marche de Granville. He also zeroes in on a cute turquoise bird with a big orange beak stuck in a golden cage and a man whose cat is crawling on his table.

Ever playful and joyfully surreal, Martin makes his lines describe winter as a brunette goddess rising from the snow, a homage to Van Gogh’s massive sunflowers, with a tiny man on a chair and an iceberg with a flaming top.

Coutellier makes art out of storybook images he has repeated over the years as icons like a boat and a horse for bold and cheerful, childlike paintings heavy on reds and gleaming thick accents of colour. He recalls Magritte in a playful striped landscape of a pipe and cups in the sky area and a man’s hat in a ground area. In Un Cheval a la Fenetre de ma Chambre, an inkjet print, he juxtaposes an image of one of his red horses against a photographic view through a window which looks like a frosty negative. It’s a fun juxtaposition of the real and the imagined.

Savoie, recently named to the Order of Canada, typically uses a lot of black and texture and found materials in loosely wrought, visceral abstracts. He exhibits a charming suite of grand piano paintings with an open grand piano that has a golden interior. Spilling out and over the piano are flecks of paper and colour like notes or sounds; they kind of tinkle.

Both exhibits are at Studio 21, 1223 Lower Water St. in Halifax, to April 7.
(ebarnard@herald.ca)