JASON MCLEAN

About

Jason McLean (b. 1971) was born in London, ON. He studied art at the H.B. Beal Secondary School during his formative high school years. In 1997, McLean graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver with a BFA. The artist is currently living and working between Brooklyn, NY and Canada. McLean is heavily influenced by the Fluxus movement, an artistic movement that championed experimentation and emphasized the process of making over the finished object. He also cites the Regional Art Movement, The Nihilist Spasm Band, The Hairy Who, Marc Bell, Mike Kelley, and Claes Oldenburg as sources of inspiration. 

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McLean is an imaginative artist who creates within a multitude of disciplines, though his artistic undertakings began in sculpture. The artist has a naivete about himself and his work. He has also worked with sound, bookmaking, zines, correspondence art, and curatorial explorations. He is most widely known for his mixed-media drawings and paintings. These works exhibit a tangled web of thoughts and ideas that take the viewer from place to place through the use of lines and bright, punchy colors. His experience as a creator is vast. He mixes mediums and pieces of his life, flawlessly leading the viewer into the realm of his own visual language and resulting in autobiographical work. As his life and quirky interests heavily influence what we see, there are traces of obsessive object collecting, mind-mapping from one idea to the next, and a slew of collaborative improvisational projects. 

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McLean has exhibited both 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. The artist also has work in a variety of 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, and Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, Canada.