ECUAD AWARD WINNER - DAVID MCLEISH

david mcleish

winner of the 2014 andré and marita nudelman award 
for visual arts, 2nd prize

David McLeish is an artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. He received a BA in Art and Culture Studies from Simon Fraser University, a MA in Theory, Culture, and Politics form Trent University, and a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University. He works in photography, illustration, and collage, attempting to marry philosophical rigor with a commitment to beautiful and arresting images.


“Memento Amore" 2012
Inkjet print, 65"x 42", Edition of 10
The images in the series “Divisions” are all diptychs of drawings rendered in chalk on the wall of the artist’s studio apartment. The drawings are negatives, making their photographic inversions into positive images. Each drawing, once photographed, was then erased and replaced by the subsequent image. The photographs are both documents of a transitory event and essential to ‘activating’ the drawings. The series is loosely based on the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, exploring ideas and images that have inextricably positive and negative valences (love, death, immortality, ambition, etc.) ideas that cannot be fully grasped without understanding both their positive and negative aspects. The studio and the camera, like Plato’s cave, become metaphors for the mind, under the sway of alluring illusion.


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