old south 42x54 Sail fabric, sail bag, rope 2016

Follow the artist they say, I say. Navigate with a follow, follow James Kirkpatrick, the London ON., multi-artist, his works are on display now at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, “To The Unseen Future” includes sculpture, found art, game consoles, interactive sound pieces, cut-outs and paintings. The gig is a playhouse of form and foam. There is a lightness to his view of the crickety Jenga-architecture this whole life we live, is, lived on and in.

Follow him as he skims the flotsam and jetsam of the modern world, surfing from one wave to another, sweeping in, one hand in the stream for balance as he carves a curve and heads in another direction, backwards, forwards to “the unseen.”

Follow him as he duck dives in and under sound waves, air waves, new waves, steady, ready as the tide turns. Follow him as he drops in to the modern mass of media, riding each break, catching another, using each platform as a base for his art, adding another layer to the modern media mass through his own art, another base for another artist to layer on another base, on and over, layer upon layer, rising up and out, 360 degrees, an incredible tower of babble for the hip-hop nation.

Sampling, scrambling, remix, transforming everything is in everything, discovery by addition, Kirkpatrick is an avant-garde archaeologist; the abandoned, the discarded, the obsolete is his canvas, the bits and bytes, the broken and bruised is the beauty of the possible; in the future unseen who knows what has worth?

All the all of the now and then is as much to us as anything, the street is equal to the elite, the back alley is equal to the front gallery, the thread is to the wire, the organic is to the electric and the current flows between all, waves to be surfed, voices to be carried; paint a door on a wall and walk through. Follow the artist.

Updated Mar 4 - Photo essay by Steven Frank.