Whitehot Magazine

A Visit with Jason McLean at Van Der Plas Gallery in New York

Jason McLean, I'm As Normal As Blueberry Pie, 2004. Acrylic ink and acrylic paint on paper, 26” x 40”


Jason McLean at Van Der Plas Gallery, New York

By DAVID JAGER
 July 22, 2024

How do you map the human mind? Jason McLean, who has spent the first half of his career making topographies of worlds both inside and outside of his mind, might have an answer. His acrylic pen drawings follow playful tangents, wedding bits of texts to ancillary lines and shapes that occasionally transform into locales, shapes, or anthropomorphic creatures, depending on his whim.

The lines are clean and colorful, ranging from sparce improvisatory compositions to congested nests of line and color that fairly burst off the page. Bits of telegraphic word salad, much like concrete poetry, link the dense associative structures of McLean's images. His mind and hand work together through free associations that tend to morph into something creaturely or anthropomorphic. Though many of the works are on paper, he can populate any surface with his handy doodling, extending to a bicycle parked just outside the gallery door.

In person, McLean still has the lanky profile and restlessly eager energy of an adolescent. Dressed in his baseball cap t shirt jeans and sneakers, it’s hard to believe he’s celebrating the middle of his career. His smile is genial, and he seems eager to talk about his work. His conversation telegraphs bits of information in associative bursts, a name with an experience with an artist, a funny anecdote leading to a recollection. Names of artists are interspersed with eye-popping bits of autobiographical information. When I ask him about the origins of his organic drawing technique, for instance, he says:

“I think it began when I was in a hospital ward with a collapsed lung..” McLean says. “that was also the beginning of my short bout with mental illness, things appearing and stuff.”

McLean was diagnosed briefly with Schizophrenia but has not had an episode for nearly the length of his career - since then he has married, fathered two sons, and managed a bustling life as an artist. All with nary a symptom...

Jason McLean, I Went Away For A Little While, 2003. Acrylic ink on paper, 29.75” x 41.75”

“ I listen to a lot of podcasts while I’m working,” McLean continues “Conspiratorial and supernatural stuff.”

“Art Bell?”

McLean Brightens.

“I called into his show once! He picked up and I was about to say something and he hung up immediately. That was my big moment on the Art Bell show.”

A plurality of influences ricochets about in McLean's lively drawings. There is the humor and ambulatory line of Francis Picabia, the loose proliferating style of Joan Miró, and some comparisons have been made to the neat logical word line diagrams of Jean-Michel Basquiat. But McLean is looser and drippier than Basquiat, there is a melting, soft serve quality to his association that veers away from Basquiat’s almost aggressively neat and logical constructions. He also enthusiastically cites Greg Curnoe’s mail art as a major influence. McLean isn’t looking to convey direct messages, necessarily, but to carry it around in the vast experiential arena of his mind. In that sense his work is more of a carnival, less a polemic.

The brightly colored Candy Eyes, with its carnivalesque vermilions, yellows and navy appears to be both the intersection of a giant amorphous building and a cutaway of a cartoon creature. There are echoes of his long-time friend and colleague Marc Bell, who achieved an international following with his surreal ‘Shrimpy and Paul’ comics for the now defunct VICE Magazine. The buzzy words “Candy”, “Game On” and “Good Time” are inked in black but manage to stand out like marquee signs. There is the implication of a city or a Coney Island Midway. But there are also references to ‘bridges’ and “in between spaces”, just as the top of the drawing offers a space to ‘Turn around’ flanked by a daisy and a flock of birds in formation over the ocean.

Jason McLean,Candy Eyes, 2024. Acrylic ink on paper 71.5 “ x 44.5”

There is a private, autobiographical symbolism being employed. “I Went Away For A little While” appears to be a meditation on aging and the passing of time. We see several truncated McLeans, colorful cubist slices of past selves receding infinitesimally into the past, suggesting that the current McLean is nothing but a fresh slice off the time continuum. The current McLean has an arrow pointing at his hair that reads ‘thinning…greying” . Current McLean is assaulted by a colorful storm of dollar bills, serpents, grocery orders, Kitchen renovation concerns and real estate apps. At the bottom is the injunction ‘Get to work. Yes, again.”  

McLean, whatever the eccentricities of his inner world and the travails of his life as an artist, is a bill paying stiff like the rest of us, chugging along improbably into the mystery that is now. He works as receiver transmitter of his impressions from himself and the world around him. Which explains one recent project included in the show, an antique radio with headphones attached. It’s a sound piece that plays back recordings left by anonymous strangers at a number he has reserved solely for this purpose. When I ask him what people can talk about he smiles and says:

“Whatever you’re thinking about. Something funny, a poem, a joke, a piece of personal history, a rant, or knowledge you want to share. Anything that comes into your head, really, as long as it’s under three minutes.” WM

 

David Jager

David Jager is an arts and culture writer based in New York City. He contributed to Toronto's NOW magazine for over a decade, and continues to write for numerous other publications. He has also worked as a curator. David received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2021. He also writes screenplays and rock musicals. 

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