Niall McClelland

Teenage Poetry (quadtych) (2014)

Third floor, located in the Wilson Lounge adjacent to the Dean's Suite.

This quadtych "...appears to be four formalist abstract shapes silkscreened across separate panels. But it's also the gate-fold from a cassette by early favourite hardcore band Rancid, with the lyrics blotted out." - David Jager, "Street Smarts" in Now Toronto, 28 January 2015.

Exhibition Information

When you walk into a Niall McClelland show, you expect certain things: an unabashed love of rough materiality, an embrace of contingency, a beginning with no end. Hot Sauce, his new show at Clint Roenisch, doesn’t disappoint.

Five huge canvases dangle unceremoniously from nails in the gallery’s main space, each a rough landscape of fragmented layers of paint, among other things.

To call them paintings doesn’t give them their due. Each was made as McClelland splayed his canvas on the floor of his west-end studio, rolling on paint and letting it seep through to the filthy concrete surface beneath. What you see isn’t so much what he made but what he found: as he slowly peeled up the fabric, it took layers of floor — years of use, stratified one on top of the other — along with it.

Read more about this exhibition in the Toronto Star

Biography

Niall McClelland (b.1980) grew up in Toronto, spent many of his summers in Northern Ireland, went to school in Vancouver and eight years later returned to Toronto where he now lives. His work has been published in Adbusters, Arkitip, Color, Design Anarchy, Hunter and Cook, I-Live-Here, Lowdown, Made, and The Walrus among others. Recent exhibitions include “In The Dark” at Eleanor Harwood (San Francisco); Resurrection at Cinders Gallery (Brooklyn); Sails, Cubes and Folds (CR). McClelland was also included along with Jeremy Jansen, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra in the group show Black To Back And Light at CR in 2009. Of that exhibition the Globe and Mail surmised that “..the works of Jansen and McClelland are plenty gritty enough to hold up against the Serras and the Kelly. Indeed they demonstrate the same kind of uncompromising bravura.”

Biography courtesy of Clint Roenisch Gallery