PLATFORM Centre is excited to announce A Separate Peace, a solo exhibition by Kegan McFadden in Gallery 2. A Seperate Peace is distributed by Video Pool Media Arts Centre. In conjunction with the exhibition, McFadden will be presenting an Active Research Lecture on 21 April at 6PM which is co-presented with Video Pool Media Arts Centre and generously sponsored by by the Fort Garry (Ladies) Pony Club.
EXHIBITION| 21 April – 28 May 2023
OPENING RECEPTION| 21 April – 7PM – 10PM
ACTIVE RESEARCH LECTURE| 21 APRIL – 6PM @ The Output, Video Pool Media Arts Centre
“It took me two years to leave my two-decades-long relationship. Sometime midway through the first of those years I’d began collecting pictures of men in pairs with their backs to the camera. These are images of men, boys, friends, fathers and sons, brothers, lovers, team mates, models, colleagues and coworkers, uniformed, naked, casual, impossibly staged, but all in pairs. I stole them from Instagram over the course of one year, screen-grabbing them one at a time. I slowly built up a cache of photos featuring these men walking or facing away from the camera lens, turning their backs on the world and into themselves. I accumulated five hundred of these images. When you begin to look for something, it becomes all you can see — getting in the way of what is actually there.” – Kegan McFadden, A Separate Peace
Conceived of as a monument reflecting on his longterm relationship, A Separate Peace was first made into a wallpaper and exhibited as part of Kegan McFadden’s touring solo exhibition, Exuberant Intimacy (2016-2021). Published in 2021 as a lettered edition artistbook by FLASK, the 1000 page hardcover bookwork of A Separate Peace includes the eponymous essay that deconstructs the particulars of this collection of images and how it dovetails with the dissolution of his relationship. The accompanying video of the same title is distributed through Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and last year was recognized as an Official Selection of the North Bay Film Festival, a Juror’s Choice Award in Winnipeg Reel Pride Queer Film Festival, and featured in Winnipeg Underground Film Festival as well as the Gimli International Film Festival. In the recent issue of Border Crossings, editor Meeka Walsh reflected on A Separate Peace, where she noted, “A slip or glaze of poignancy rides over this artwork…”. This will be the first time all three iterations of A Separate Peace (book, video, and wallpaper) are presented together.
BIOGRAPHY
Longtime contributor to artist-run culture in Canada, Kegan McFadden has cultivated a research-based approach to art production which mines language through queer affect while employing modest means of production. Working through an interdisciplinary approach as an artist, curator, writer and publisher, McFadden has created exhibitions using bookworks, printmaking, photography, installation, and text. Having established the role of Director/Curator with PLATFORM (2007-2012), where among numerous initiatives he started the Active Research Lecture Series, McFadden segued to an independent curatorial practice, presenting projects extensively locally and across the country, eventually moving to the west coast in 2017. His projects have investigated his own relationships to personal and public queer histories using memory and its faults as a focal point. In 2020 a fifteen year survey of Kegan’s printed matter, Partners in Crime, was produced by HOTAM Press Book/Shop (Vancouver, BC). Known mainly as a curator and writer, this will be McFadden’s first solo exhibition in Winnipeg since 2010.
