Rick Leong: Sleepwalking Daydreams
MAW: Deflective Skepticism & Critical Plinking
May 2–June 14, 2014
Opening: Thursday, May 1, 6–9pm (artists in attendance)
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal, QC
Canada, H4C 1A9
Parisian Laundry is delighted to announce Sleepwalking Daydreams, a solo exhibition of represented artist Rick Leong. The exhibition presents an ambitious array of Leong’s signature landscapes and their inhabitants.
Sleepwalking Daydreams is assembled from Rick Leong’s representations of the transformation of landscape from the mundane to the fantastical. In an exploration of the relationship between magical realism and ontology, Leong injects fiction into life experience in his hybrid imagery. This series of work represents the slippage between two states of being—sleepwalking and daydreaming—where Leong questions notions of conscious action and subconscious experience. He invites the viewer to delve into this world through representations that pull from iconic Canadian landscape painting, contemporary animation and psychedelic imagery. Employing a masterful technique and an exquisite attention to detail and complexity, Leong evokes a sense of serenity and wonder throughout his latest exhibition for Parisian Laundry.
Rick Leong obtained his MFA from Concordia University in 2007. His thesis work was immediately acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts affirming his emerging practice. In 2008, he was a finalist in the Royal Bank of Canada’s Painting Competition that toured at important venues such as The National Gallery of Canada, the Power Plant, Toronto, and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. In addition to having participated in many group exhibitions at different Canadian and international venues, Leong was also the subject of important solo shows at Two Rivers Gallery in British Columbia, Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, as well as the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and finally at the McClure Gallery in Montreal. Leong’s work is collected widely across Canada.
Montreal based collective MAW presents a site-specific project in Parisian Laundry’s bunker space. MAW’s process-based sculptures assume that the end is inevitable and that homogeneity is the means to said inevitability. The objects and narratives in this work were created with the intention of being destroyed. Through the act of shooting their work with firearms of varying sorts MAW democratizes their collective thoughts by leveling them to the same plane of being, forcing all ideas into an equally accessible scope by not allowing them to have a genesis, but just an end as rubble. The works become a monumental effigy, having been critiqued in the harshest way by the hands that created them, they have been cared for, loved, hated and destroyed. Deflective Skepticism and Critical Plinking playfully denotes a mode of thought that makes light of art historical reference and criticism. Plinking is onomatopoeic and a standard shooting term, referring to the action and resulting sound of shooting a non-traditional target, such as a tin can. The immediate misnomer when reading the title is a transgression from classically rooted critical thinking prefaced with re(de)flective skepticism, a practice within critical thinking.
MAW is a brand. Furthermore it is a corporate brand, which is occupied exclusively by secured shareholders, and which seeks to explore self-interest under a veil of faceless, and socially valuable product. And so MAW stands brazenly, creating personal fabrications that are not worth their weight in Canadian pennies. Undeterred, the shareholders of MAW revel in excitement. Collectively they share a desire to prospect nuance from the many materials which motivate their process. Continually they pursue to present the experience of inexperience, combining the ideological with that of the material. By colluding with the spectacular, MAW remains shameless, and chooses to hoist their sense of value high into the air to flap or fall. – Gabriel Baribeau, Jackson Darby, Max Evans, John Gunner, Craig Spence, Simon Zaborski.
