Toonies ‘n’ Loonies: Vivid Visions from the Great North at Van Der Plas Gallery

By STEPHEN WOZNIAK June 3, 2025

If you're feeling drained by the relentless churn of outsized American national newsfeeds, consider a refreshing detour into Toonies ‘n’ Loonies: Three Canadians at NYC's Van Der Plas Gallery. This playful, pointed exhibition offers a more intimate, eccentric lens on the world. The three featured artists—distinct in style and medium—share a common thread of erratic line, disheveled gesture, and baroque whimsy. Their works oscillate between deeply personal introspection and chaotic external engagement, revealing both sanctuary and storm. The title, a pun on Canada’s quirky coinage, sets the tone for a show that revels in contradiction and surprise—much like the cultural identity it reflects.

Left: Susan Day, Winter Solstice Ceramic Plate Series, 2024, ceramic, glaze, 9.75” x 9.75”. Right: Devon Marinac, I Eye Can Can Dew, 2025, Mixed Media on Paper, 42” x 68 3⁄4”. Courtesy of Van Der Plas Gallery.

Artist Susan Day crafts allegorical landscapes in glaze and clay, her Winter Solstice Ceramic Plate Series serving as both object and oracle. Rendered in somber blues and wheaten whites, her plates whisper of solitudes both seasonal and spiritual, though never without the subtle insistence on human communion. These are not heirlooms but rather heralds—relics of domestic ritual reimagined as acts of quiet defiance against the long, inward pull of winter, or even the remote ways of living and working we’ve entered in recent times.

Upper: Devon Marinac, Wave The Red Flag, 2024, Mixed Media on Paper, 18.5” x 22”.  Lower: Devon Marinac, Wear The Red Flag, 2024, Mixed Media on Paper 18.5” x 22”. Right: Devon Marinac, Knot a Square Dance, 2025, Acrylic and Pen on Paper, 30” x 44”. Courtesy of Van Der Plas Gallery.

Devon Marinac’s fervent tableaux, by contrast, are high-octane bursts of color and absurdity, vascillating between the absolutely innocent and the utterly unhinged. Wave the Red Flag and This is Not a Square Dance are equal parts silly vaudeville spectacle and existential cartoon, where an arm-locked chain of Cubist female figures dance-kick their way across bar tops, teetering dangerously close to the edge. It’s a riotous indictment of performative identity—part hyper ‘zine art, part psycho-theater.

Left to Right: Jason McLean, Golden Years, 2025, acrylic on paper, 22” x 30,” Jason McLean, Future Directions, 2025, acrylic on paper, 22” x 30,” and Jason McLean, Time Traveler Travel Lite, 2025, acrylic on paper, 22” x 30”. Courtesy of Van Der Plas Gallery.

Jason McLean, the master cartographer of mental detritus, headlines the show with his signature sprawling psychogeographies—most notably in Golden Years and Future Directions, where memory and material collide in wormhole-like primary and secondary-color linework. Text, symbol, and anecdote unravel across the paper like a transit path for the subconscious, mapping not only place but a defiantly personal perspective.

Together, these three Canadian makers sketch a vivid topography of wit, neurosis, and national charm—where the “loonie” is less coin than condition, and mutable madness, in its many forms, becomes a method of seeing. WM