Galerie Division, Montreal, is pleased to announce its inaugural solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Alex McLeod.
Alex McLeod is a pioneer of virtual spaces. An avid gamer, he spends considerable time collecting minerals, building space stations, launching rocket ships and exploring the outer universe. In turn, these pursuits inform his image-making, expanding his visual vocabulary and extending the reach of his work to include an infinite digital realm.
For this exhibition, rather than flaunt the seamless verisimilitude of CG design, McLeod has developed an imperfect, stylized technique, almost painterly in its expressiveness. In Artist Studio, an example of the artist at his most self-reflexive, he has created a fanciful simulacrum of his workspace, where crude polygons abound. By embracing a low polygon count (the equivalent of a low pixel count in 2D work), McLeod purposely betrays the artifice of his image, eschewing the 3D equivalent of photorealism in search of more personal images. In the imagined studio, on a virtual desk, sits a gravity defying see-saw – a reminder that here in the province of the artist’s imagination, reality operates unburdened by the laws of physics.
