PLAYBILLs – Jason McKechnie
From March 3 through April 3, throughout the run of MOB.
The 16 works presented here are a witness to an artistic practice that is both instinctive and conceptual. They mark a new milestone and tell an uncharted chapter of an Œuvre that never ceases to renew itself.
The work surveils meaning through the conceptual camouflage of semiological signs in the service of ‘costume’, ‘story’, and ‘performativity’. That said I shy away from expressing personal subjectivity in my work in exchange for a closer objective observation of reality and am careful to separate out political values from aesthetic contexts. I do not view the work as a project meant to extend any particular historical obligations. I am immensely interested in the ‘performativity’ of art-making, dedicated moments of creativity, which is how the PLAYBILLs series came to pass; works which are reframed and cropped areas of paintings and video I have produced rephotographed and presented as signs of an ‘event’. To paraphrase Susan Sontag from a radio interview it is my hope ‘the tension of my work arises from what it may look like in contrast with what it is’ – a wonderful contradiction I hope offers some awkward pictorial subtexts as well as peculiar questions for the viewer while raising the stakes and feeding the agency of the works.
Jason McKechnie was born in Calgary, Alberta (1969), and makes his home in Montreal.
His work is widely collected in Canada, the USA, and Europe; and is part of permanent museum collections.
