Charlottetown –Observing the Observer, a major survey exhibition opening April 2 at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, highlights the career of a P.E.I. born artist who continues to make significant contributions to Canadian culture.
Observing the Observer, offers a review of the career of Canadian artist Allan Harding MacKay. Featuring works drawn from key periods in the artist’s life, this exhibition presents a selection of major projects of MacKay’s four decade long career. It includes such traditional forms as charcoal drawing to digital media and video installation.
While his focus has ranged from deeply personal portraits to difficult public engagements with war torn states such as Somalia and Afghanistan, MacKay projects a thoughtful and poetically charged dialogue with his subjects. Included in this exhibition are early conceptual/process works, individual and group portraits, a new work for the Gallery and a number of war works, including Somalia Yellow Vignettes.
MacKay has had a long career in the visual arts as a gallery curator/director and as a professional artist exhibiting widely nationally and internationally. He was founding director of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and gallery director at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon and the Power Plant at Toronto, Harbourfront. He has served as visiting artist at several Canadian universities and art colleges. In 1996, CBC aired a documentary on MacKay's Somali experience, "Changing Perspectives." MacKay also visited Afghanistan in 2002 as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program. He is presently based in Kitchener and is the Curator at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery.
This exhibition is curated by Andrew Hunter, the Director/Curator of Render, the University of Waterloo’s innovative arts based research, teaching and exhibition centre. Hunter has produced contemporary and historical exhibitions and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. His previous artist/curator projects for the Confederation Centre Art Gallery include In the Pines, The Donnelly Project, Seth: Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, To a Watery Grave and Dark Matter: The Great War and Fading Memory.
Allan Harding MacKay: Observing the Observer runs April 2 to June 1 at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Cutline: Perfect Mountain, by Allan Harding MacKay
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Media contact: Dan Wall, publicist, Confederation Centre of the Arts, phone (902) 628-6135
Email: confederationcentre.com, web www.confederationcentre.com