MAC MCARTHUR | bio + folio

Mac McArthur grew up in Montreal until age 14 in 1963 when the family moved to Toronto. He credits time in the city with forming his world view through direct exposure to Hungarian refugees in 1956 and hours reading the Montreal Star's daily transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Tel Aviv. Montreal also ruined him for further interest in professional sports after witnessing Richards/ Beliveau/ Geoffrion/ Plante etc at the Forum and Etcheverry/Patterson at Molson Stadium.  He returned briefly in 1989 for a staged reading of one of his plays at Playwrights Workshop Montreal.

Widely travelled his interest in visual arts was accentuated by visits to most major world galleries in his 20s. Although he developed his own collection ... lithographs of David Blackwood / Ed Bartram, world sculpture ... creation of his own digital images only began in April 2007. Using scanners and his sculptures he has developed work that has been quickly recognized as original in both content and emotional impact.

The prints in the Montreal exhibition "Un chuchotement du Gandhara" focus mainly on Shona sculpture from Zimbabwe. Gandhara in modern Pakistan/Afghanistan was a melting pot of sculptural influences. The title image combines a Buddha from Agra with Shona work. Also featured in the exhibition is the nontych "The Cliff" which has been animated as a short anti-war film on Youtube.

Currently McArthur is expanding his scanner work to include glass mannequin hands, mirrors and flashlights but continues to create images in a single pass of the scanner bar without using collage techniques.

Despite his brief period of creativity his work has been included in both Montreal's Nuit Blanche in March and also at the Brighton (UK) Fringe Festival in May. His work hangs in private collections in Montreal, Vancouver and Brussels.

Given his years of work with Doctors Without Borders, Free and Children and currently Engineers Without Borders it is not surprising that this exhibition has many activist goals including Fair Trade. Although owning the sculptures he uses to create his images a further royalty is being paid to the original sculptors. For one sculpture more funds have already been paid into Zimbabwe than the original cost of the sculpture itself through a dealer in California.

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