2015, VANCOUVER, CANADA
TELL HER NOTHING, SHE TELLS ALL
“Shopfront esoterica and modernist sculpture rub shoulders in Tell Her Nothing She Tells All”
Borrowing its title from a slogan common to psychic shops, the show continues MacLeod’s interest in using pop and vernacular languages to, as she puts it, “speak to more profound things.”
“Tell Her Nothing She Tells All” focuses on the objects and practices usually lumped under the banner of “New Age.” On three walls of the gallery are neon facsimiles of street advertisements for psychics and healers. The most playful one, Seated Figure (2015), shows a man meditating just above the gallery floor, his chakras stacked in the wrong order. Hanging high on the back wall is the Eye of Providence, enclosed by a pink neon hand that irradiates the nearby works (Five, 2015).
Displaced from their intended function, these neons strike an ambivalent pose in the gallery setting. In a sense, they’ve traded up: transforming from commercial signs into commercial objects, from advertising spiritual enterprises to becoming endowed, as artworks, with their own significance.
Their displacement, in other words, makes an analogy between the consumption of art and pop mysticism that is both amusing and unpleasant to stomach.
MacLeod’s exhibition is a sparse affair, with a handful of smaller objects that solicit intimate viewing. One welcome exception is Churinga (2015), a LightJet print of an opal, which the artist has set in a comically large gold frame. Culturally, churingas are stone or wooden objects considered sacred by Australian aboriginal tribes, often for providing a bridge to totemic ancestors. As such, they span lived and mythological time. By photographically enlarging an opal, MacLeod has amplified the churinga’s supposed powers. The resulting print, roughly the size of a full-length mirror, captures the many contradictions of the “New Age” seeker (the implicit protagonist of this show).
In its shimmering rainbows, the opal reflects not who we are, but the sublime being we imagine ourselves to be—a being, we are told, who is attainable through the purchase of magical goods, no matter their original context and use.
Source: Tyler Coburn
Photos: Scott Massey