This summer, Gary Spearin steps into two roles in McMaster Museum of Art exhibitions – artist and guest curator. As artist, he presents his installation iNifiNiTi in the Museum’s Panabaker Gallery. As curator, he has mined the MMA vaults, drawing on contemporary works from McMaster’s collection for the complementary installation, PAINTING BEYOND a body of views.

Both exhibitions run May 12 – August 18, 2012 with a Public Reception on Friday June 1, 6 – 8 pm, when the artist/curator will be present. Don’t miss it!

Since 2007 Gary Spearin has been producing a series of paintings that are displayed as an installation titled iNifiNiTi, which he has conceived as an optical device to explore and to visualize the resonant dynamics of time and our experience and perception of it.

While the presentation in any given gallery installation is variable, determined by factors such as available wall space, they are always installed in a uniform grid, and in an order decided by the artist only during the hanging. The grid serves as a formal grounding structure contrasting with the spontaneous order of placement. Within it there are infinite possibilities for reading the works individually or the installation as a whole.

The individual titles are derived from dates (month/day/year) of sometimes personal significance but mostly of random selection, and always unrelated to the date of their making. The surfaces of the paintings are so visually rich and intricately detailed that any one of them invites endless, obsessive viewing, as does the whole of the installation. Each work possesses a unique character, yet the identity of individual works can easily be obscured by the overwhelming nature of the group. The whole is the sum of its parts and each of the parts is a self-contained whole. Spearin is painting pictures of ephemeral, infinite dimensions that exist beyond those which we can perceive or know.

– Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay “Picture Infinity”; David Liss, Artistic Director and Curator, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto.