Greg McHarg | The Shape of Space
The Shape of Space explores Greg McHarg’s innovative use of cutouts and repetition, transforming cardboard into a study of form, void, and rhythm. Through precise cuts and deliberate patterns, McHarg redefines the relationship between material and absence, allowing space itself to take shape within his compositions.
The interplay of light and shadow, solid and void, gives each piece a dynamic presence, shifting as the viewer moves. The corrugated layers of cardboard add texture and depth, emphasizing the contrast between structure and fragility. By using an everyday material, McHarg elevates the ordinary, inviting contemplation on how space is both defined and disrupted.
In The Shape of Space, the repetition of forms creates a visual cadence, echoing natural rhythms and architectural patterns. This exhibition challenges viewers to consider not just what is present, but what is missing –and how the negative space carved away is just as vital as the material that remains.
Olinda Casimiro | Executive Director
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I will always recall Greg McHarg showing me some coloured paint chips purloined from the paint department at Home Depot. This was in 1995, the year of his MFA exhibition at York University, Toronto. He saw them as somehow precious, beautiful found objects that were free for the taking. Throwaways, but not for him, as the work in his graduating thesis show demonstrated. Now, in thinking back those thirty years, I see the same thoughtful, quiet, thrifty, careful character at work in Greg. But the zeitgeist of the world has changed and with it a more fully understood critique of modernism and modern art than had been initiated in the 1990’s. Now that he is returning full-time to making art after a life as a primary school teacher, husband and father, how does the new work in this exhibition at the Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg, Ontario, compare?
For this exhibition Greg McHarg will be showing three sculptural works made from cardboard boxes, Cluster, Stack and Sheet. Like the paint chips, materially they come from the refuse, the discarded, the residue from our consumer society. Historically and materially they suggest the aesthetics of Italian Arte Povera, an art movement known for the Italian phrase “poor art” or “impoverished art”, which was one of the most significant and influential avant-garde movements to emerge in Southern Europe in the late 1960’s. Arte Povera included the work of about a dozen Italian artists whose most distinctly recognizable trait was their use of commonplace materials, literally ‘poor’ or cheap materials that they repurposed for their practice. These practices presented a challenge to established notions of value and propriety, as well as subtly critiquing the industrialization and mechanization of Italy at the time. McHarg’s work continues this quite subtle critique within a contemporary context. As well, Greg’s use of cardboard boxes gives a nod to American Pop Art of the 1960’s, in particular Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. Although the use of ‘found’ materials historically evolved from Dadaism, notably Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Bicycle Wheel (1913), Duchamp was questioning what is art? Is art the stuff of life? and if placed within the right context, such as a museum, does everything become art? Duchamp’s found objects remained almost completely untransformed by him. However, Greg McHarg’s use of these materials is anything but ‘raw’. In other words, he lovingly transforms these materials making them into ‘art’, in a way more akin to the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ collages made from the found detritus that he picked up or acquired on his travels in Hanover and Berlin in the 1920’s and 30’s. In a Schwitters collage, the ‘found materials’ are transformed into art by his use of other materials, mostly paint, and the careful collaging and placement of the compositional elements. As in Greg’s work, the handmade, the traces and touch of the artist are all evident. The purpose is not confrontational or primarily conceptual but the making of something mundane and ordinary into something loved and beautiful.
But, how does McHarg communicate this love, this beauty? Perhaps it partially comes from his background growing up on the Canadian prairies in a family, one suspects, was not surrounded by wealth, glitz and glamour but hard, sober work and an appreciation of what they had. In these works, Greg methodically and laboriously hand cuts geometric patterns from the cardboard leaving the traces of touch, of struggle, unconcealed. In these acts of removal, the boxes become fragile, venerable, wobbly skeletons of their former selves, almost abject remnants of their past. In all three works, the remaining cardboard is painted in white or black, creating a chalky, uneven surface that goes against the ’clean’ the digital, the technological, conjuring up the history of these objects, their lived, human experience and the act of painting them. Although the patterns are repetitive, geometric, modular, their ‘seeming’ imperfection, their decay, is what we notice. Placed or hung to interact with the viewer’s body and the architecture of the small sculpture space of this Gallery, they are human scale; Stack mimicking human height and size, Cluster, a series of small boxes attached to the wall, jutting out at eye-level into the viewer’s space and Sheet placed against the back window acting as a light modulator. Their materiality is heightened by their irregular shapes, by areas that seem to be about to break apart and collapse and that cast shadows on the walls or floor. Greg’s use of ‘cutouts’ and placement to create shadows recall yet another tradition, the German Bauhaus and particularly the artist Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator,1930, made with extreme precision using high-tech industrial materials such as polished metal and glass that broadcasts confidence in the new modernity, in the upcoming 20th century. But Greg McHarg’s works broadcast anything but confidence in the future, they hang limply, they teether, they fall apart. Almost 100 years later our world view has changed, and McHarg’s art has responded to these changes.
What has changed? Bigger is no longer better, more is no longer more, excess is waste, and thinking of our environment as simply an infinite resource for our pleasure is over. Big cars, rushing down highways guzzling gas, air travel to sample ‘exotic’ places, a throw-away society of fast food in plastic trays to support our frenzied lifestyles, all of what modernism promised has been put into question. All ‘signs’ indicate that this approach to our world can’t continue. But how does this relate to Greg McHarg’s work? In an initial view of this work, we may think of it as dystopian, as an endgame, desperate, just hanging on…. but, in this exhibition McHarg shows us how to go on, not what remains. Through his low-key critique of our consumer society, his patience, and love for the mundane and homely he is showing us a way forward that makes a utopia out of less, that sees minimalism as a way of life, that points to a very different future.
Janet Jones | Guest Writer