Casey McGlynn | The Journey the Meeting the Destination
Casey McGlynn | The Journey the Meeting the Destination
May 4-18, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2-4 PM
The Journey the Meeting the Destination is a visual open journal by Canadian interdisciplinary artist Casey McGlynn, whose latest body of work is a rueful meditation on the past 20-odd years of his life and career. Featuring the artist's distinct and multilayered horse studies-cum-interior cartography, this exhibition also marks the McGlynn’s return to his herd series, the frequent subject now imbued with renewed symbolic potency.
At once a personal reckoning with the inevitable passage of time and his own reluctant maturation, McGlynn’s canvasses also function as fragmented musings on our contemporary anxieties and the intense precarity of our crisis-ridden times. The understated poignancy of “Leaving Toronto After 25 Years” succinctly captures the artist's critical stance, as McGlynn dwells on eras ended and pasts to be lost, and documents his own attempts to navigate the uncertain present with humor and stylistic verve.
With a recurring pantheon of characters and motifs from McGlynn’s ever-growing, pop-culture-influenced personal mythology — extant forms of his youth at play with spectres of a more immediate past — McGlynn narrates our collective coping. Forcefully expressive, profoundly honest, and wildly irreverent, the raw poeticism of McGlynn’s compositions honor the trials and tribulations of lived experience and evoke a visual catharsis, as he casts a perversely hopeful eye to the future at hand.