Saturday evening at the Flying Pony Gallery/Café.
Proprietor Andrew Horne embraced the South Asian street festival going on outside and threw Melanie MacDonald’s show opening at the same time. On his side street, he and fellow artist Rob Elliott built the big street sculpture pictured below. A colourful tent offered fresh, delicious Flying Pony baked goods, too.
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There have long been artists who look back at the past, sometimes inviting us to contemplate the ruins of collapsed civilizations (and consider the fate of our own), sometimes romanticizing bygone “golden” ages.
Melanie MacDonald’s scrapbook paintings are different. They simply celebrate the images and colours of sentimental pop motifs that she found in a couple of 1930s/40s scrapbooks. Kitschy images are monumentalized in large, wall-spanning canvasses, forcing our attention by sheer size.
Colours are as bright and vivid as the day the scraps were first printed. Painterly impastos or textures are out. The canvasses are flat as the printed cards they refer to.
Originality in the works owes to creative arrangements of images, plucked from different sources and skilfully placed into new compositions. The combinations are whimsical and untroubled. The overall effect is cheerful and the paintings, as objects, are very well made.
I’ll be going back to the Flying Pony for a longer look than one gets on an opening night.
As to meaning, the possibilities are as light as you like, or as rich as you can make them. As MacDonald notes on her web site, the original, anonymous scrapbooker seems to have been creating unexpected narratives with surprising juxtapositions. She picked up the ball, ran with it and now tosses it to us.