SHAHEEN Modern and Contemporary Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Kent based artist Neil MacDonald. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, November 4th from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. The exhibition will continue through December 15th.
Since late 1999, the majority of Neil MacDonald's softly focused representational paintings have concerned various airline disasters of the past 20-25 years. He has titled this ongoing inquiry/body of work Collision with Terrain, which refers to the National Transportation Safety Board's official term for an airline crash site. MacDonald is not concerned with sensationalized scenes of violent death but, rather, peripheral moments from the aftermath and cleanup of the various disasters in question. Working from his own photographs of video footage, the artist translates carefully selected images to canvas (and sometimes linen) via a meticulous painting process that involves the methodical deconstruction and reconstruction of original source material. MacDonald pours over video; stills a desired image on screen; takes a 35 mm snapshot, and then works from that photograph; along the way, he might subject the image to any number of simple low-tech manipulations, such as enlarging, reducing or cropping using a Xerox machine/photo-copier. From there, he grids off the canvas and transposes the image in an even-handed and systematic manner. Neither sentimental nor nihilistic, the resulting paintings depict a very traditional, romantic or Arcadian landscapes that have been forever transformed by the consequences and eerily calm aftermath of mechanical error and human failure. MacDonald's formal approach to painting and working process involve a certain control -- loss of control tension that echoes the subject matter itself.
For his upcoming exhibition at SHAHEEN, MacDonald turns his attention away from the "Collision with Terrain" series, choosing instead to apply the same working process and formal and thematic interests to the investigation of environmental mishaps and disasters, which he views as a more omnipresent threat with more drastic and lasting consequences for the landscape and its inhabitants. One recent group of paintings concerns Centralia Borough, an all but abandoned town in rural Pennsylvania that has been forever changed (if not subtly decimated) by an underground coal fire that has raged beneath its visible landscape for the past thirty years. Another cycle of work takes as its subject matter the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal India. In both cases, MacDonald continues to his ongoing inquiry into human error and mechanical failure and their effects on the landscape.