acetate, mesh, cardboard, duct tape, wood, wire, cotton rope, plexiglass, coated polyester shower curtain with grommets and washers,
programmable spotlight, digital projectors on tripods (x3),
Boarding House Gallery, Guelph, ON, Canada
August 21st – August 29th, 2020
backlit transparencies on light boxes, 2020
Space is paradoxical. We can experience it as both internal and external, as individual yet collective, as three dimensional while flattened and contained within screens. Through backlit images and immersive installations, Alexine McLeod’s colour-shifting screen-spaces embrace the contradictory and many faceted ways we encounter the world.
Practicing an experimental and collage-based approach, McLeod cuts, combines and layers texturally incongruous materials with slowly shifting digital projections, to create singular, yet fragmented spatial-collages. As projected light and shadow appear to cut surfaces apart and merge foreground and background together, space is traded for surface and depth for flatness – or is it the other way around? When filtered through the camera’s lens, optical boundaries become destabilized, asking one to take a second look. Divided yet connected, one participates in a reversible exchange with the apparent outside. In these embodied and reflexive states of awareness, curiosities emerge about perception itself.
When the continuously shifting light of the virtual permeates the seemingly fixed materiality of the actual, openings for newness arise. In a digitally mediated environment of acceleration, McLeod’s work focuses on the temporal relations of the present moment, allowing one to slow down, become engaged with their physical surroundings, and embrace the potential that uncertainty has to offer.