Ian Funke-McKay: Serpentine Signs

Ian Funke-McKay is a Halifax-based artist whose installation practice combines a variety of mediums in a synthesis of medieval and contemporary display. Drawing upon heraldic motifs, the interwoven patterns of historical tapestry and costume, and the energy of saturated colour, Funke-McKay produces images and signs for a new visual field in which past energies resonate within the present. His colourful and faceted arrays and forms echo the worlds of computer-generated imaging and video-game animations, aspiring to fuse the future-oriented legacies of abstract painting with a “cryptic terrain of pre-Renaissance motifs” in moments that unfold in a nonlinear fashion; the word “serpentine” refers to what the artist describes as “another kind of sensing, based on the winding way a creature moves through the world.”

-Pan Wendt, Curator