We are delighted to announce Jonathan McCree’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Through The Wrong End Of A Telescope. Continuing McCree’s investigation of and fascination with exploring lived experience in the body, painting and sculpture open up in this exhibition, where time no longer progresses in a linear fashion. McCree constructs in a hectic process of addition or assemblage where the past, present and future exist at once.
Through The Wrong End Of A Telescope approaches the arrangement of experience with this logic at its heart. The exhibition includes cardboard sculpture, cast aluminium and folded metal sculpture, painting and drawing. The emphasis in this work is on play and freedom, the kind of energy that McCree relies upon in his practice. The tool kit of elements does exist as a whole, however, the total structure proposes a set of relationships, which are fluid and emergent. The viewer is implicated in a game of improvisation, the challenge is to discover an individual path through the material.
“In London’s National Gallery a long time ago, I remember seeing and puzzling over a painting, which may or may not have been ‘Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar,’ by Velasquez. I was a teenager at the time and my recall is vague but I remember a wide landscape viewed from a strange, high up vantage point. There were groups of figures, dotted about and busy doing things which didn’t seem to connect in any obvious way.
I remember at one point realising that I was not looking at a snapshot of the world, that the figures in the painting were distributed across time as well as the landscape. The painting would only open up to me if I started to think about the picture in terms of time being spread out and spatialised. Thinking about time in spatial terms means that events no longer progress like in a movie, or remain fixed like a photo, but are visible all at once. Coexisting via a chaotic process of addition, the past, present and future are all piled up, active and ‘present’.
As a structure, this coexistence has always fascinated me. It jumbles up our understanding of things in a lively way, unfixes a point of view and allows for fluid, improvised readings.”
– Jonathan McCree, December 2024
