This week we were able to catch up and conduct a mini-interview with Toronto-based artist and printmaker, Alexandra MacKenzie. MacKenzie is exhibiting works on paper within ‘A Clear Blazing Fire’, the group show currently being presented in the Magic Pony gallery space. Alexandra Mackenzie graduated from OCAD in 2011, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in printmaking, however drawing is central to her practice. In addition to being a visual artist, Alexandra a musician and currently plays in several groups as well as working on solo material, to date she has toured the UK and the United States.

‘A Clear Blazing Fire’  is the Magic Pony’s first exhibition of 2013 and features work by Alexandra Mackenzie, Howie Tsui, Jamiyla Lowe, Laird Henderson, Nathan Jurevicius, Patrick Kyle and Theo Gallaro.

March 15-April 14, 2013
Opening Reception March 15 from 7-10pm

Click here for join the event on our Facebook page.

Click here to see available work by Alexandra MacKenzie.

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You are an extremely talented visual artist, but you also play music with your solo project Petra Glynt. Is there any conceptual or mental connection for you between this two forms of expression? Or do you feel they are each their own thing and separate from one another.

It all comes from the same soup- the same passion, the same ideologies manifest their way into whichever form feels the most natural, whether it be music or visual, it all comes from the same place. 

When I write music, I am collaging compositions, rearranging them, finding which aspects resonate, colouring them, building them up from the ether - and this isn’t too dissimilar from drawing. Either way my heart and mind are searching for the same things.

Two things that always seem quite distinctive about your artist practice are both the impressive scale and the amount of detail you imbue your pieces with. What are your choices behind deciding to work so large with your drawings, a medium typically associated with smaller works on paper? Also, what is your attraction to what some would say might describe as the obsessive amount of detail that you add to your pieces?

The more I draw the more the drawings themselves will open up to me. I know this sounds nuts, but when this happens it’s like they are offering me passage into their world(s), and this is what they become, especially the super scale ones.

What is your attraction to what some would say might describe as the obsessive amount of detail that you add to your pieces?

The detail aspect is partly how they unfold…all things become more complex as we get to know them and see them up close. I like to get engrossed and feel comparably small and at the mercy of something bigger than myself. I like the feeling of being in control of the growth and development of a drawing, tending to its needs, and allowing it to grow in harmony with it’s components, like any healthy garden.

Drawing is infinite so there’s no issue in terms of scale and what’s appropriate. There is just no such thing. Though lately I’m trying to work things out on a smaller scale. I cannot have a balanced life that is dedicated to drawing strictly large scale, it demands too much of me.

There is an incredible amount of movement and energy to the characters within your work; with figures are melting into one another or bursting with vegetation and crystalline growths. How much of your imagery is premeditated and how much of the drawing process for you is automated or related stream-of-consciousness techniques.

I work out much of the composition with pencil then I dig in with pen, and I’ve begun incorporating more reference imagery as of late. I would say that these days it’s 50% premeditated and 50% automated/stream. I look at it like writing a narrative or traveling. I wouldn’t want to take a trip to a land I’ve never visited with a full itinerary of which animals I’m likely to encounter and a detailed schedule of where I have to be and when and what to look out for. This just leaves little room for self-discovery, chance, or new circumstances that force you into a position where you are challenged and faced with making decisions. I like the feeling of my brain being stretched. I also have a surprisingly terrible attention span and would get bored real quick if I knew the outcome of my work before I got started.

Do you feel that there is any sense of spirituality to what you are drawing and representing? You often use iconography that seems to be drawn from a psychic hot pot of new age, shamanistic, and tribal aesthetics. Could you talk about your influences and the thought processes that inform this unique aspect of your work?

I’ve worked through a lot of “spiritual” imagery in the past to help me deal with the lack of it in our society and what it means to me. But I have moved away from the more iconic spiritual imagery because I don’t feel it’s productive to go down that road, this is not to say that the spiritual is no longer an aspect of my practice. Lately it remains present in balance with the ideas that I am working through and is more or less hypothetical. I’ve become gradually more concerned for the well-being of the planet and it’s inhabitants and this has become a major part of my practice as an artist.

My work attempts to speak to the disillusioned state of the world’s people living in a backwards system where profit comes first. Spirituality isn’t taken seriously nor can it flourish in this state. I feel that so long as our planet is hurting, so long as we are eating up it’s resources and killing it’s landbases faster than they can be replaced, and continuing the colonization of it’s most marginalized and threatened peoples and cultures, and until people have more say and choice there cannot be harmony in the world, and as a result spirituality occupies this really strange alienating space in my work as an artist and I think in our society as well.

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We would like to extend a big thanks to Alexandra MacKenzie for taking time out of her busy schedule to participate in this interview and answer our questions! Come check out some of her work in person in the exhibition ‘A Clear Blazing Fire’  at Magic Pony gallery which runs from March 15th to April 14th!