Transit Gallery






Andrew McPhail at Robert Birch Gallery

The Globe and Mail Saturday March 27, 1999
by Gary Michael Dault

 

Andrew McPhail's mordant MICRO-RETRO is cunningly named. For this small deft and deadpan exhibition, McPhail has mined the rich vein of his own former works, using sundry swatches and shards from earlier pieces, as the basis for these bright, elfin drawings in pencil crayon on mylar. The drawings, each 12 inches by 12 inches, in candy colours, make up one large mosaic of the artist's sensibility. They are an inventory of the things McPhail likes enough to draw: things such as a coffee table in yellow outline on a searing orange ground, two blue wine goblets on a pink disc, two confrontational swans beak to beak, the anguished light bulb that hangs down in Picasso's GUERNICA, the signatures (over and over, like a wallpaper pattern) of Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh. Skulls. Trees. Mice. Happy Faces. It's a long shopping list. What saves McPhail from triviality and campiness is his touching earnestness, his labour-intensiveness, and his apparent commitment to a hopelessly out-of-reach heroism in art - and his willingness to honour, instead, what is here and what is available.




Harold Klunder
Matthew Varey
Fiona Kinsella
Leslie Sorochan

Barry Lorne
Robert Creighton
Michael Allgoewer
Laurie Kilgour
Steve Mazza
John Kennedy

Andrew McPhail
     


Installation Shot: start '06 gallery artist & invitational group show,
t r a n s i tg a l l e r y, 2006.
Andrew McPhail - second piece from the left.
 

Dealing in contemporary Canadian art, Transit Gallery is located in the heart of Locke Street, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Currently Representing Harold Klunder, Matthew Varey, Fiona Kinsella, Robert Mason, Frances Ward, Robert Creighton, Micheal Allgoewer, Terence Kinsella, and Laurie Kilgor.