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just after dawn and close to midnight (On Seeing and Knowing)

Exhibition Archive

just after dawn and close to midnight (On Seeing and Knowing)

Kevin McPhee

Exhibition
26.06 – 11.07.10

Event
10.07.2010 | 2pm

A Separate Reality (a reading) 1968 – 1971, an artist event, completes the dialogue. The event shall take the form of a reading of reworked text from A Separate Reality, by Carlos Castaneda. This reading serves to conclude, or further elaborate, the relationship of structural response to who is playing what role – between seer/ apprentice/ audience.

My predilection is to see,’ he said.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I like to see,’ he said, ‘because only by seeing can a man of knowledge know.’
‘What kind of things do you see?’
‘Everything.’
‘But I also see everything and I’m not a man of knowledge.’
‘No. You don’t see.’
‘I think I do.’
‘I tell you, you don’t.’
‘What makes you say that, don Juan?’
‘You only look at the surface of things.’

Conversation between Carlos Castaneda and don Juan, April 1968

David Dale Gallery & Studios presents Scottish artist Kevin McPhee’s first solo exhibition in Glasgow as the culmination of a four week residency recently completed in David Dale Gallery’s east end space.

‘just after dawn and close to midnight (On Seeing and Knowing)’ is a negotiation between artist, material and process. Throughout his residency, McPhee has established a working method that is responsive, intuitive and fragmented. This has evolved into a record of mediation between space, paint, object and self – an accumulation that is systematically reduced. Edited and reduced to an Ecclesiastes degree, the work becomes a multi-media echo, each element reliant on the next to form a dialogue of wall painting, sculpture, performance and supposed narrative – the latter becoming the former.

In straddling expression and interpretation, McPhee takes on the role of a latter day Zarathustra – operating somewhere between absolute and intuitive knowledge, in the pursuit of transcendental truth.

 

Kevin Mcphee lives and works in Edinburgh. He has exhibited widely since graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2005, including a solo exhibition at Sierra Metro, Edinburgh; a residency at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany (both 2009); and art school uk phase 1 & 2, Cell Project Space, London. McPhee has been the recipient of the Edinburgh Visual Artists award, Edinburgh City Council (2009); the Creative and Professional Development Award, Scottish Arts Council (2009); and was on the committee of Generator Projects, Dundee (2005 – 2007). He will begin a two year MFA course at Newcastle University in September 2010.