Allan Harding MacKay: “Observing the Observer”

Many artists and curators have made their names by exploring the creative problem-solving that results from “getting something wrong.” But in the work of artist Allan Harding MacKay, currently on view in “Observing the Observer” at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, everything is right. The PEI-born MacKay has made a 40-year career out of transforming mass media images and haphazard portrait photographs into exquisitely rendered drawings that examine the ways we look at and frame images. Although he works in diverse media—drawing, conceptual photography and video installation, to name a few—MacKay’s practice is anchored in an interest in finding a visual locus where the intimate, the social and the political intersect. In his ongoing Source/Derivations series, for instance, photographs document the effects of candlelight on famous pictorial and journalistic images. In this metaphorically charged and reverential atmosphere, the emotive powers of Robert Capa’s famous photos of the Spanish Civil War are made clear when positioned alongside medieval madonna-and-child paintings. MacKay has said of this series that “the work of other artists is full of possibilities,” but in this solo retrospective it is obvious that his own work will open up new avenues for a future generation of observant Canadian artists. (145 Richmond St, Charlottetown PEI)