Mapping Minds at Van Der Plas

Devon Marinac; Bird of Ill Omen; 2023; Acrylic on Canvas; 39”. x 54”

Mind Mapping . . . And Other Stories, the latest exhibit to come to the LES’s Van Der Plas Gallery features a trio of New York-based artists, tied together more by their distance from center than their artistic styles.

Jason McLean, Devon Marinac, and Kevin Wendall (FA-Q).   But while Wendall tends more toward Jean Debuffet, McLean shouts out more to Gerhard Richter. Marinac shows up somewhere in between.

But while their styles diverge, the three seem equally intent on exploring the fuzzy side of the emotional landscape through symbology, illusion,   and representational hocus pocus. It’s fun and frightening at the same time, like that time someone spiked the punch with ayahuasca.

The gallery says they “map the spheres of thought and feeling across the sidewalks, and bookshelves, and bars and faces of those around all of us for all of us to take in.” This is an apt description of a show that is at one lucid and confusing.

Jason McLean; AOK TODAY; 2022; Acrylic on canvas; 30” x 24”

Devon Marinac (b. 1988) is a Canadian visual artist who was born in North Vancouver and currently resides in Toronto. Marinac’s practice involves drawing, collage, painting, assemblage, sculpture, and bookmaking, often in combination. His work possesses a strong graphic sensibility through a highly detailed figurative style, which translates and mutates according to the medium being used.

Kevin Wendall (FA-Q); Fear soul; Oil on rice paper;38” x 25”

While the images are often fantastical, the pieces are nevertheless rooted in day-to-day locales, observations, and autobiography. Through recycling and reimagining found materials, Marinac uses art as a vehicle to understand his own life and the world around him, often in poignant and comical ways.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1956, Kevin Wendall’s (FA-Q) “proper” art career began when he moved to New York and became a graffiti artist in the 70’s and 80’s and where he changed billboards and advertisements by scraping out letters to give them new meanings.

By the late 80’s Wendall was considered a rising star in the contemporary art scene, living a rough life on the Lower East Side where he was involved with the Rivington School, made up of a group of metal sculptors, blacksmiths, painters, performance artists, and other outsiders who worked and met in abandoned courtyards on Rivington Street.

Wendall’s work focuses on the depiction of faces that stray away from the normative of the figure and bring the view to a blending of color and shape forging on the abstract, leading the viewer to what is often silly, cynical, or reaching out from a turmoil that was created in turmoil and at times an intimate laughter and a vast spectrum of emotion felt and witnessed. 

“We were against commercial art, and against capitalism, championing art for people,” the heavily anti-establishment FA-Q said. He worked and lived on the Lower East Side for many years until his death in 2011.

Jason McLean was born in London, ON in 1971. After attending H.B. Beal Secondary School, McLean graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver in 1997. 

McLean’s diverse art practice includes sculpture, sound works, zines, book works, mixed-media installations, correspondence art, curatorial explorations, puppets, and performance, but he is probably best known for his diaristic mapping and surreal drawings and paintings. Inspirations fueling his daily observations are relationships with local and visited environments that create a body of work often described as mental maps, where samplings of his walking and street-level investigations are mashed-up into different poignant combinations of gesture, image and understanding.

Grounded in family life as husband and father, McLean works by using humor to touch upon challenging subject matter, such as sadness, loss, displacement, and economic hardship.

He has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at The National Gallery of Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Loyal Gallery in Malmo Sweden, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Franklin Parrish Gallery and Zieher Smith Gallery in New York City. He has worked in major collections throughout North America including the Museum of Modern Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Bank of Montreal Collection and the Royal Bank of Canada. McLean is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Canada, Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Back Gallery Project, Vancouver, Canada.

The show is at Van Der Plas Gallery, 156 Orchard Street, through July 16.