Monte Clark

Alexine McLeod’s interdisciplinary practice explores the similarities between perceptual experiences and lens-based mediating technologies. Since recently completing her MFA at the University of Guelph in Ontario, she has expanded her compositional play with found materials and projected light, into spatially immersive collages that shift, distort and engage with the tensions between subjective and objective vision. Gazing through the digital windows of cell phone screens and projected scrims of coloured light and shadow, McLeod’s work harmonizes the transparent and opaque interfaces apparent between self, surface and space.

For her current exhibition, Arising, McLeod has produced four light boxes and an immersive installation displaying vibrant fields of layered colour, material and texture. Simultaneously embracing contradictory ways of seeing, these abstract planes of light, communicate the ‘real’ materials being photographed, as inherently virtual and actually abstract. Merging contradictions, the optical tensions of these image-spaces, produce an awareness of the participatory nature of seeing, wherein what you are looking at, is also what you are looking through. With slow looking and the embodiment of active perception, how can our perceived limitations be renegotiated in the now?