Conor Fagan
What The Heck?
July 30 - August 22, 2021

My Pet Ram invites viewers to delight in the playful contradictions of Conor Fagan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery: What The Heck?. Fagan’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings imagine vibrant, uncanny worlds that appear real, yet could never exist in reality. 

In the Pile drawings, serene stacks of stones seem to defy gravity, or perhaps have different laws of physics altogether. Indistinct organic blobs, which Fagan calls “proto-beings,” are often punctured by small shadowy holes. These openings suggest interior cavities that are just out of view, creating a sense of a larger world that extends beyond the frame of the canvas. Further, these works mischievously play with the viewer’s sense of scale. Without any recognizable reference points the perspective pings between micro and macro, from the realm of single-celled organisms to massive astrological entities like black holes.

Deeply interested in scientific imagery— in particular relating to processes of creation— Fagan develops his work through a kind of evolutionary process. Based on hazy images in his mind’s eye, he sets rules for the development of the work from which their final forms emerge. As with biological evolution, it is not a straightforward path. Fagan describes his process as “beset with failure,” as many of his paintings have been wiped away and restarted several times over. Many of his paintings feature flat, watery smears of paint as a sort of primordial soup from which objects emerge: connecting the creation myth of life’s oozy origins on Earth to the tactile pleasure of spreading paint on canvas.

This exhibition spans 4 years of Fagan’s work, from the birth of his first child through the present. Through the seriousness of, say, becoming a father or living through a pandemic, Fagan opts for humor and play in his work— hence a pensive series of small paintings that he calls “thingys”— and embraces humility, unknowing, and surprise. When asked “Why blobs?” he replied, “Who knows?”

Conor Fagan obtained his graduate degree in fine art from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He recently completed a year as an artist-in0residence in Roswell, New Mexico at the Roswell Artist-in-Residency Program and was the Richardson-Spica Artist in Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy during the spring of 2019. In 2020, he participated in The Spring Break Art Show in New York, New York —and participates regularly at the Glen Arbor Arts Center here in northern Michigan. He has work in numerous public and private collections worldwide including the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Baie St Paul. During the academic year, Fagan teaches drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography at Interlochen Arts Academy.