Meaghan Hyckie

Ley Lines

October 14, 2023 – November 11, 2023

MEAGHAN HYCKIE

Ley Lines

October 14 – November 11, 2023

Artist Talk: November 11th at 2pm

Olga Korper Gallery is pleased to present Ley Lines, Meaghan Hyckie’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Analog drawing has always been at the centre of Hyckie’s work, but over the last five years her practice has expanded into digital drawing, screenprinting, intaglio, textile design and most recently, sculpture, via her first public artwork. This exhibition brings together a selection of work across these mediums with one core image, a house, stripped down to its essential parts: a rectangle with a triangle on top.

The ubiquity of this simple architectural form obfuscates the complexity of its many origins. For the artist, this iconic shape is a literal interpretation of her beloved childhood home in Toronto, one of thousands built across Canada as part of a federal initiative in the 1940s to provide housing to returning war veterans and their families. These enclaves of affordable homes on winding streets with parks and schools embodied progressive design ideologies of that era, while proliferating policies that excluded residents based on their race, gender and class.

By presenting iterations of the same icon, as tessellated images and singular portraits, Hyckie abstracts and articulates a rootless sense of disorientation in work that evokes this complicated history and evolving social context. Through recessions and economic recoveries, climate change, a global pandemic and the current housing crisis, these homes have never been accessible or desirable to everyone, but they remain covetable sites of conflicting ideals.

In Ley Lines Hyckie animates the spaces between and within, mapping the historical traces and energetic connections between the houses people live in, the land they occupy, and the air they breathe. Combining subtle tonal variations with chromatically intense palettes, Hyckie creates delicately tactile, optically vibrating images of homes, suburban landscapes, and atmospheres. Using drafting techniques and grid systems as armature, the work in this exhibition oscillates between representation and abstraction, channeling feelings of sentimentality and anxiety through familiar imagery that simultaneously deteriorates into shapes, colours and patterns.

Meaghan Hyckie (b. 1983, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) received a BFA from OCAD University. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions the Art Gallery of Ontario; Art Windsor-Essex; Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver; Museum London; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal; and Smokestack Gallery, Hamilton. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum London, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada. Hyckie is represented by Olga Korper Gallery. She lives and works in Toronto.

The artist would like to gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario, and the Toronto Arts Council. She is also very thankful for creative and technical support from Laine Groeneweg and Smokestack Studio, Jeanette Johns, Taiga Korper Bentley, David Trautrimas, The Gilder and Tyler Bright Hilton.

Thank you to Laura Findlay for the photo documentation of the show.