Niall McClelland, We Lost The War, 2013. Metal, plastic, rubber and fabric. Courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
Niall McClelland
The Nature Of Your Oppression Is The Aesthetic Of Our Anger
8 March — 13 April 2013
at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
Over the last five years Niall McClelland has built up a diverse body of work that mines the veins of arte povera, punk rock and urban minimalism. It is just as often started outdoors, left on a fire escape all winter, baked on a dock all summer or folded into his pockets, nabbed through a 3am hole in a fence, as it is made in the studio in explosive clouds of mercury dust and flying glass. There is certainly an alchemical aspect involved: from the crudest materials comes beauty and elegance, hungover on the surface, left like scars. Texture reigns. And process. Both run through his various series, the Tapestries, Skins and Stains to name a few. Often economic circumstance begats the best results, like the thrown-out toner cartridges scavenged from the back of Dufferin Mall. McClelland leaches out their dregs onto Japanese paper where the dying inks blossom into living patterns the way lilies love manure. Same for the drawings made from blown florescent tubes smashed onto linen, same for the rubber carpet underlay that is draped and then spray-painted the way the son of Eva Hesse and Robert Morris might paint. The new Sharpie abstraction, The Home Stretch, is likewise born of CMYK but here McClelland himself becomes the printer, a sputtering officejet of misalignments and smudges that gives out before the job is done. [read the full text here]
Clint Roenisch Gallery
944 Queen St W
Toronto, ON
M6J 1G8
Canada
clintroenisch.com
Opening hours
Wednesday – Saturday: 12h00 – 18h00
Niall McClelland, I’ll Be Your Doormat, 2012. Spray paint on rubber. Courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
Niall McClelland, Too Poor To Paint, To Proud To Whitewash, 2013. Spray paint and glass fragments on linen. Courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
Niall McClelland, The Nature Of Your Oppression Is The Aesthetic Of Our Anger, Installation view, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto