117.5 Ideas for Tattoos

Casey McGlynn’s approach to art-making has at times been driven by his use of painting to escape, to explain his challenges with his own identity, and to inadvertently express his need for validation. Exploring issues of societal expectations, body image, self-expression, and a myriad of other topics, McGlynn’s work often reads like disparate pages from a personal journal, pieced together on the canvas. However, the terse application of the classification “Outsider Art” to his work swiftly sweeps it into a too-concise category, disregarding the evidence in each piece of the artist’s vulnerability, depth, and acuity in expression. Stories are presented with order, nuance, and elegance within chaos.

At first glance self-expostulatory, a closer read of McGlynn's paintings reveals subtleties and intimate portrayals, both of self and of the world in which the artist exists. In 117.5 Ideas for Tattoos, opening August 1 at Foster/White, McGlynn has created 117 and a half one foot square paintings, each depicting a brief moment. While frequently working within a grid in his larger canvases, this exhibition has given McGlynn the literal freedom of breaking up space, allowing each moment to be fully experienced. Here you'll find easy portraits mingling with pieces whose references are charged with meaning. Blue trees, gnarled faces, figures in motion, and horses, all recognizable expressions within McGlynn's signature visual language. Images swirl into a dizzying crescendo, replete with the artist's rough application and irreverent tone.

McGlynn graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997, and has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States. His work is in public and private collections in New York, Hong Kong, and Canada. In 2005 the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado had a retrospective of his autobiographical work. Casey McGlynn was a featured artist at the 2015 SOFA Chicago Exposition, and his work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Globe and Mail, and other publications.

Please join us for the opening of 117.5 Ideas for Tattoos
Thursday August 1, 6 - 8 pm