in good time | meichen waxer @ brooke mcdonald

For our inaugural exhibition, #3 Gallery presents Meichen Waxer at Brooke McDonald.

An ornament: at the top, end, or corner of an object. Ranging in styles the finial serves as a decorative punctuation. The finial aligns the functional object with a specific aesthetic, tradition or context. 

Meichen Waxer looks to domestic space as one of her primary references and arenas. Particularly, her works engages in conversation with what is understood commercially as “North American Traditional” ornamentation, which is an amalgamation of Colonial Revival, 19th century Neo-classism, 18th century French Country and 19th century British Country. The staging of space and the relationship to aspiration and social projection is a particular line of investigation in which she takes focus. 

In Good Time is a reproduction of a flattened finial, traced from a computer screen;carbon transferred multiple times using the same stencil to plywood and quickly cut out using a skill saw. This method of reproduction naturally causes minor variation from form to form, although they do not deviate so much that the original reference is lost. The forms are then gilded in an attempt to mask the crude reproductions and stage them as ‘more’.

Meichen Waxer is an artist based in Vancouver, having recently completed her Masters of Fine Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her practice engages with culturally inherited structures and their relation to different modes of representation, often looking to architecture, ornamentation, and objects that hold generational, cultural and nostalgic value. Waxer is the current Artist in residence at the Anvil Centre (New Westminster, Canada) and Co-Director/Founder of Arts Assembly. 

Brooke McDonald is a visual artist whose practice is based in painting. With an interest in gesture, abstraction and the picture plane her work investigates the devices used within contemporary painting. McDonald received her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2015.

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