IT’S A NEW WORLD, AND PERHAPS ONE OF MANY
Edmonton artist explores what is, and what could be, with new show
That painting, is it of a woman or a man — or neither?
Over the last decade, Travis McEwen’s portraits have presciently subverted traditional gender labels, predicting the mainstream conversations redefining a once gender-binary world.
McEwen’s oils are painted in luminous neons, the feminine and masculine melting into each other in his surreal, fashion-posed figures. They ’re simultaneously fragile and bold, afraid yet cocky.
Hanging his new show, opening Friday at dc3 Art Projects, the 32-year-old explains, “It was something I was thinking about: my own experience being a queer person and my relationship to gender.”
Since he first started seriously painting a decade back, he notes, “I do think the world has caught up. There’s more language now, more vocabulary. It’s maybe easier and better for people now who explicitly identify as non-binary or gender fluid to identify that way, and talk more authoritatively about it.
“I identify as a queer person, not a gay man. I’ve always experienced gender as a fragile thing. But it’s really important to a lot of people. It’s obviously not cut and dry for everyone. The boxes that are set out — it’s not real, and is at the same time.”
A post-doctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota, McEwen left Edmonton in 2011 to do his MFA at Concordia in Montreal, returning briefly after his masters.
“I was there to get the work done,” he explains, “but I felt like I was just repeating myself.”
In Montreal, the artist started clustering his watercolour portraits, creating unintended narrative relationships, depending on where they were hung. This became his thesis project and his paintings at Art Gallery of Alberta’s 2015 Biennial, Future Station, also had that parlour wall vibe of awkward family and forced community.
But seeking escape from all those eyes staring back at him, McEwen began sketching alien landscapes, full of sunrise-sunset colours. It was pure sci-fi, as if right off the 1970s covers of Dragonriders of Pern novels.
He explains how it happened. “I needed a break from reading so many heavy theoretical texts and just dove in and read all six Dune novels, and the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.”
Along with their desert settings, the epics are “both science fiction, but even in them they ’re still looking forward. Not just future space, but themes of what’s not working now — what could be working better somewhere else?”
He brings these ideas home: “Peripheral peoples, queer people, are often involved in a way in a project of world-making. In a lot of ways, this isn’t working for us. What could be different?
“So I started doing these tiny landscapes. I mean, they were just for me — it was just for fun, you know?”
But they did fill a hole.
“I’d gotten a lot of comments that (the portraits) were not in space” — no pun intended — “or they’d always be by themselves. So this has allowed me to contextualize them. Now they’re somewhere. And they’ve become more like characters.
“I decided to just go for it. And now this almost pseudo-storyboard thing is happening — at least the suggestion of a larger narrative.”
Still, as far as the figures go, “I think the isolation’s really important. As much as I want to say it’s forward looking, it’s dystopic, also. This could be Earth … the world’s getting hot.
“But I still want openness in the narrative.”
For this homecoming solo show, the human-free landscapes run along a wall painted yellow to match his studio in Minneapolis — a colour McEwen originally disliked, but grew fond of — and this primary hue invades the work.
In long rows, the scenes are lined up by depicted horizon line, which messes with scale in some of the portraits, making people appear as giants. And they’re not alone.
Endless superstructures and broken concrete rainbows hang in the background, mysterious architecture. What they are, even where they’re placed — on the ground or
in space — is left ambiguous.
As a collection of 66 paintings, the show is titled The Arch: Plans for a Heterotopic Space Opera.
Whether McEwen actually makes said space opera is moot, he says with a laugh.
“I really respond to projects that are plans for something, even if they’re unfulfilled.”
He cites affection for Canadian conceptual art pioneers General Idea, who faked beauty pageants — and prefers Christo and JeanneClaude’s drawings to their imposing, landscape-dominating art.
“It doesn’t need to happen to be interesting,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not like for me a project ends. It just keeps going.”