More than many artists, Jason McLean’s art is directly related to his identity, from day-to-day thoughts, habits and activities, to his travels and recent moves between cities, and to larger questions relating to health, fatherhood and his own mortality.
‘If You Could Read My Mind’ features drawings, paintings and illustrations of colourful sculptures, all of which form an idiosyncratic visual record of McLean’s experiences and perceptions, which, as the artist puts it, act as a rhizomatic diary that pictorially represents my relationship with local environments . McLean’s chronic mapping captures, with dazzling vertigo, his restless movements through an ever-changing terrain of cultural and social relations.
Everything from fragments of popular culture to quotidian experiences appear in McLean’s immersive works, but running through is a quirky and self-deprecating sense of humour, often deployed as a means of dealing with more serious issues, including his mental health.
93 colour and b/w