David McClyment

Toronto artist David McClyment’s third exhibition at David Kaye is titled 1963: painted from memory. Many of us recall 1963 as the year JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.

It is that for McClyment, too, but it is also the year his father died. McClyment was 10. “I have had other pivotal years since then,” the artist writes in his hectically poetic gallery statement, “but this was the first that I remember as a true turning point.”

And so McClyment has memorialized this true turning point in a suite of hotly coloured paintings of the artist’s recollections from that galvanizing year. Employing his trademark stencil process (he draws his images on paper, cuts them out and makes them into stencils, and then spray-paints them onto prepared plywood panels), McClyment juxtaposes images in such a way that the smaller panel at the top of a work may or may not enrich or amplify what is in the bigger painting below it.

The gallery is alive with nostalgic imagery – that will make sense to viewers of a certain age (the paintings bear titles like Puff, The Magic Dragon, Juliet Forgets the Words and Laika, The Russian Space Dog). And McClyment’s raucous stencilling technique – which often makes for fuzzy and approximate images – is a handy way to illustrate how memory can be both insistent and imprecise at the same time.