Lisa MacLean Artist

Two of my digital photographs have been selected for the international juried exhibition of electronic art organised by the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association. Matrices 2010 will be shown at the Danube Gallery, KAS Gallery, Hungarian Workshop Gallery, D-Court Gallery, and FISE Gallery in Budapest, Hungary from August until October 2010.

Landscape with Cowboys

Satyr v 1

See more work from this series here.

Just riding around town with my mannequin bits …

I have made a video collage documenting some of my site-specific installations in ruined cave houses in the village of Ibrahimpasa, Cappadocia, Turkey, made in March 2009 while an artist in residence at the Babayan Culture House. For more information on this project, click here.

In honour of Halloween this year I am continuing to play with my workshop mannequin shrine …

See more here.

Fun and games with mannequins on the Yellow point peninsula:

I finally had an opportunity to arrange my mannequins on the island this past week. Later in the afternoon, with the beautiful sun just starting to wane in the sky and casting a golden glow over the back of Maggie’s yard, I arranged my plastic people in various configurations next to the trees.

Later on, after dark, in preparation for Halloween, I constructed a shrine inside the workshop, using materials found around the property. I was amazed to see that the Christmas lights coming out of the headless neck of one of the mermaid mannequins actually worked – huzzah!

See more here.

While visiting my friend Lorrill for dinner with Maggie, and taking pictures of her lovely fall garden, I was musing about needing mannequin bodies and, lo and behold,  Lorrill took me next door where she’d seen some mannequins in a neighbour’s garage sale. Wow – major score. I acquired several bodies, one complete with a metal holder in place of its head, a beautiful old-time porcelain juvenile torso (with an optional red hat and blonde fright wig), and many arms, some with hands and some without. These will serve to create an pseudo-octopus and my five painted heads will give completion to the headless torsos. I am already in the planning stages of a Nanaimo mannequin shrine (to appear somewhere in the not-too-distant future).

See more mannequin madness here, here, and here.

I had been musing about moving my mannequins around the city and photographing them, and today, being a beautiful sunny day (and who knows how many more we`ll have), was the day. First, though, I had to take my camera to the park down the street to photograph the vast white mounds of soap suds someone had generated in the fountain there, so large that they looked like icebergs swaying gently in the breeze. After snapping a few pics, I zoomed down to Stanley Park and carried my green plastic garbage bag of heads and painted sticks and my small white plastic bag of dolls down to Third Beach.

I had planned to set them up in the midst of the many small inukshuk stone sculptures that I had seen there on the weekend but when I got there, those were all gone, either knocked down by the waves or by some passerby. Instead, I pushed the sticks into the sand and photographed the heads and dolls against the backdrop of Georgia Strait and the freighters tied up there.  I enjoyed their bright colours against the deep blue of the morning sky.

My next stop was the area between Second and Third Beaches where Mr Stone Master usually has all his large inukshuk totems; here, too, although there had been many on the weekend, they were all gone except one. I arranged the painted heads and dolls in a configuration next to the stone sculpture and documented them. As I was doing this, several people riding bikes stopped to see what I was doing, apparently enjoying the vibrancy of the painted heads, calling them “Whacked“. Next stop on the head tour was English Bay, where they were arranged in a line along a low stone wall bounding the flower beds and in and around a large driftwood stump, much to the delight of local homeless folks gathered on the benches there.

The final stop on the head tour was Granville Island, where I set them up on a large metal sculpture, a metal staircase and in the Creekhouse pond. Here a passerby asked me what I`d done with the bodies and we both started cackling. Back at the ranch, I saw the Davie Duck Whisperer  in the park sans duck but with a cockatiel on her right shoulder. Just another day in the neighbourhood …

See a few pictures here.

“Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it – as Hegel already saw – with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” (Walter Benjamin)

The constellation: a symbol of the relationship which emerges when the historian places a number of apparently unrelated historical events in significant conjuncture. The constellation “links past events among themselves, or else links past to present; its formation stimulates a flash of recognition, a quantum leap in historical understanding.”

(http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html)

20th century German critic and writer Walter Benjamin understands history as a constellation of events rather than a linear progress through unidirectional, homeostatic time. I don’t presume to think that what I’m doing represents a “quantum leap in historical understanding” … but I am exploring Benjamin’s idea of the constellation in this series of work.

“History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of humanity’s power in the world.” (Heraclitus)

This is another photographic project on which I’m currently working:

See the rest on this page.

Downtown Eastside Vancouver – see a few pictures here.