GAVIN LYNCH | MONDEGREENS
Gavin Lynch | Mondegreens
January 14-28, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception Saturday, January 14, 2-4pm | Artist in Attendance
We are proud to commence 2023 with Mondegreens, BC-born and currently Quebec-based artist Gavin Lynch’s anticipated inaugural solo exhibition with Bau-Xi Vancouver. Employing an intuitive and ingenious graphic collage approach to his compositions using a combination of acrylic, watercolour and sand, Lynch builds an aggregate perception of the natural world using field documentation, daily forest hikes, digital archives, imagination and memory. The resulting amalgamated motifs, painted with clean lines, a pixelated effect and exacting precision, speak at once to our changing relationship with nature, the virtual realm and the genre of landscape painting.
Artist's statement:
Around 2014 I was making paintings of hypothetical scenarios: forest fires, sea squalls and windstorms. Now these are all realities of climate change that we are seeing with startling regularity on the news, internet and in person.
Right now, I am interested in making images that could be seen as nature re-assembling itself, a post-human landscape somehow evolving by fusing disparate elements together to create unlikely scenarios: spaces where trees from different parts of the globe are coexisting, where interior spaces morph into outdoor spaces, and everything is held together by collage and paint. I have processed nature via the familiar lens of the digital screen, using actual paint to mirror the processes of photo editing software: trees are seemingly copied and pasted into new locales, flora often concede to pixelation, and entire motifs are “dragged and dropped” into new scenarios.
The ability of nature to rebound from human-induced catastrophic events is well documented (demonstrated in Cal Flyn’s wonderful non-fiction book Islands of Abandonment), and I like the poetic idea of doing it pictorially through a painting wherein such a reassembly could splice together unexpected elements. After all, nature often surprises us with its abilities.
- Gavin Lynch 2023