Andrew James McKay is a graduate of the honours arts programme at Emily Carr University of Art+Design. He was, over the course of his studies, the recipient of a number of merit scholarships, grants, and awards. In 2019, he became the first student in the history of that institution to be awarded, upon graduation, the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Inclusion, Democracy, and Reconciliation. He has since gone on to a promising emerging practice, receiving a Canada Council Research and Creation grant in 2022.
“I’d been aware of Christiane Pflug’s paintings for some time, and the spare geometric composition of Cottingham School in Winter 1 (1968) had a special appeal: there was something very true in terms of the Ontario winter colouring. After reading her biography this past summer, Somewhere Waiting, I’d been thinking more and more of her later work.
“In my own practice, a lot of the time I’m concerned with responding to my immediate social, personal, and economic circumstances. After a stint of life back in Ontario, I’d relocated once again to Vancouver. A few years prior, the trimmed hedges that demarcate the blocks and residences of the city had fuelled a series of paintings. Upon my return, these hedges mostly were still there, but huge swathes of the city had been or were being levelled to make way for expensive condos. These condos, then and now, seem to be entirely out of reach owing to my relative poverty as an artist, and the buildings themselves echo the linear obstruction of the hedges surrounding them.
“As much as I admire Pflug’s work, she gives little direct comment on the economic life of Toronto at the time. Perhaps, in fairness, things felt a little less fraught in that era, but it’s hard for me to say either way. Nevertheless, for right now, the importance of showing the mounting divisions in the city feel pressing—something to keep busy at in the present and, I hope, a document for a later audience of the substantial urban upheaval taking place.”
