MARCUS BOWCOTT
Images of large ocean going ships have figured prominently in my work during the past decade. In the last few years I've been painting other man made structures such as scaffolds, aeroplanes and automobiles - all of which are extensions of our bodies in space. Their very structure tell stories of our aspirations and intent, our sense of exhilaration and of our limitations and feelings of longing and loss. The ancient myth of Daedalus's mechanical invention and the loss of his son is as vital now as it ever was.
The images of the ships began as a personal response to my (then) working environment on the Vancouver waterfront. I wanted to convey the size and gravity of the vessels I worked around, relate their mass to the diminished scale of the human body, and communicate the sense of physical vulnerability and awe I felt when working near them. I vividly recall climbing up a thin swinging gangway of a massive ship and thinking to myself that the ship was like a modern mercantile equivalent of a Gothic cathedral.
As the Gothic cathedral is a powerful symbol of twelfth century Europe, these structures are poignant symbols of our time and culture, or more to the point, our mass culture. Like mass culture, they are our construct, are extensions of "us" and "our stuff". And as it is with mass culture we are dwarfed by them, somehow made less significant in the presence of their overwhelming scale. I'm interested in exploring the ambiguous aspects of this metaphor by experimenting with different ways of representing these inventions. With this contradiction in mind I present these structures, in turn, as beautiful, ponderous, dysfunctional, ugly, elegant and functional.
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