Max Wyse Mexico Terrerium
Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage:Thursday May 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition:May 28 to June 19, 2010
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, June 9 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Montreal artist Max Wyse. Mexico Terrarium includes approximately eight large format mixed media paintings on Plexiglas. In a universe that brings together animal, vegetal and human bodies, the paintings of Max Wyse place us outside history in the company of human figures engaged in acts of spontaneous and magical transmutation and transformation.
These new works – including two, eight-foot long horizontal freizes – transform the gallery into a kind of hallucinatory dream chamber. Amalgamations of both his own imaginings and Aztec mythological figures, Wyse’s surreal hybrid beings – part human, part animal/vegetal – seem deeply embroiled in the task of reconstructing themselves and negotiating a densely packed and often enigmatic habitat. Wyse’s creative manipulation of the human form results in headless creatures with tree stump legs, or serpant-like torsos. However surreal the iconography, the works display a draftsmanlike attention to detail and a subtly orchestrated palette. And in their own way, they make visual commentary on the interface between humanity and the environment that plays itself out beyond the representation of ritual and provokes a somewhat dismembered existence, alternately threatening and reassuring.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 16-page catalogue with text by well known Montreal writer and curator James D. Campbell. The artist would like to thank the Canada Council as well as the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Born in 1974 in British Columbia, Max Wyse lives and works in Montreal. In his work he proposes a symbiosis between the human, plant and animal worlds, revealing the tensions under the skin of a complex reality, where the strange belongs to the quotidian. He has exhibited in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Paris and his work figures in numerous private and public collections.
Victoria LeBlanc
Director, McClure Gallery