Graffiti art on downtown walls can be a crime. When Audrey McKinnon did it, it was merely a Misdemeanor In Colour And Scale.
The images were sprayed onto the interior surfaces of the Omineca Arts Centre, taunting the senses into deeper investigation.
The art show is a study in larger views. Eyes, jaw lines, flower petals get blown up to giant.
Movement gets slowed down to frozen still.
The normal palette of skin tones and ambient light is exploded into brightness. Liberties are taken, and the gaze becomes fixated on the effects.
"I have fantasized so many times that one day I would have a space to display that was so open and spacious that I could finish the painting by going off the edges of the panel and onto the background wall," she said, indicating where her large wooden square wasn't enough to contain one of the feature paintings. Like a child who couldn't colour inside the lines, this one carried on onto the blankness onto which it is attached. It was like graffiti of the graffiti, an ironic metaphor for what McKinnon was trying to achieve in the first place by blowing her portraits and still-lifes out of usual proportion, using the spray-can medium.
"I'm obsessed with faces. I don't know why," she said, a diminutive human figure among the enlarged images of the exhibition.
"I'm interested in what makes conventional beauty. What is the magic ratio? When you're working this large, it creates a redefined boundary to work within. I enjoy the abstract, but the juxtaposition of a tangible image within a set border. There is this awesome part of the face from the jaw to the cheekbone that is a beautifully blank canvas of its own, there is so much you can do with that if the proportions are right. This size lets that come to the front view. It's right out there. You can't miss it."
Another focus of her attention when the scope is this large is the human eye. "Each one contains a different emotion, if you can make the eye come alive," she said. It's a challenge to give successful birth to that animation when the view is so magnified and the tools are so dynamic. She doesn't have the luxury of precision that a paintbrush or pencil allows.
"Paint does amazing things, if you let it," said McKinnon. "The things you can do with texture, colour, light... When it is spray-paint, it's volatile. It comes out in a rush, you can't stop it, then it drips and oozes, the colours blend, and you can get frustrated by that. I get off on that."
The arrangement of Misdemeanors In Colour And Scale schooshed on the canvas of time in much that same way. There was a squelch of action, then a drooling of circumstances and finally a pooling of resources.
The first blast was when McKinnon took part in a Community Arts Council and Downtown Prince George co-initiative called the Back Alley Art Project whereby artists created paintings that could be affixed to the otherwise blank or downright ugly walls of downtown alleys. The project has been ongoing for more than a year but none of McKinnon's pieces had been installed when she moved away from Prince George.
A CBC broadcaster by profession, she moved to take a job based out of Kelowna hosting the afternoon show for the B.C. interior.
She stayed in touch with Prince George from that distance, and even continued to be involved in this city's art scene by participating in things like the Prince George Citizen / Community Arts Council initiative called The Alphabet Project (26 artists shared the workload of representing each letter of the alphabet).
When the hosting duties in Kelowna came to an end and McKinnon had the world as her destination menu, she chose to return to Prince George.
Once back in the north, her local CBC colleague Jordan Tucker spotted McKinnon's back alley paintings filed away in storage and let McKinnon know where to find them.
Reclaimed from their purgatory, these paintings formed the basis for Misdemeanors In Colour And Scale, with some additional works as well.
"I have a lot more like this, but I felt these ones had a cohesiveness," she said.
My odd fate, the Back Alley Art Project retained one of McKinnon's pieces and this week it was installed in a downtown alley. Where?
Why on a hidden-from-street-view side of the Omineca Arts Centre, of course. It will be in that place permanently, but today is the final day of McKinnon's exhibition inside the facility (located at Third Avenue and George Street).
It is open 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., it is free of charge to wonder in and enjoy the magnified and brightened faces, and it will also form the ambiance for the music concert by Genevieve Jaide tonight, as an added artistic finale.
The pieces in the show, and the others at McKinnon's studio, are for sale.
Visit the gallery for more details.
