Van Der Plas presents Mind Mapping . . . And Other Stories at the gallery’s location on the Lower East Side, 156 Orchard Street, New York, NY.

The exhibition brings together Jason McLean, Devon Marinac, and Kevin Wendall (FA-Q).Three of the gallery’s represented artists are put on display through a central inspiration of expression and how related ideas and images radiate out into what is new.

Stretching beyond three decades, the three artists bring a wealth of experience and varied schemes in exploring the landscape of change and the narratives of people and places through what has changed and the effects of time from the 1990’s to the change of the millennium all the way through today. Feeling becomes thought and thought becomes expression, with color and line, with the image that illustrates the outside world meeting the inner world to translate what is new of the street and community and how the mind comes to understand this while mapping itself as it branches out through the many parts of its surroundings.

Through figure and symbol, abstraction, or colorful cynicism, Jason Mclean, Devon Marinac, and Kevin Wendall (FA-Q) map the spheres of thought and feeling across the sidewalks, and bookshelves, and bars and faces of those around all of us for all of us to take in.

Devon Marinac (b. 1988) is a Canadian visual artist who was born in North Vancouver and currently resides in Toronto. Marinac’s practice involves drawing, collage, painting, assemblage, sculpture, and bookmaking, often in combination. His work possesses a strong graphic sensibility through a highly detailed figurative style, which translates and mutates according to the medium being used. While the images are often fantastical, the pieces are nevertheless rooted in day-to-day locales, observations, and autobiography. Through recycling and reimagining found materials, Marinac uses art as a vehicle to understand his own life and the world around him, often in poignant and comical ways.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Kevin Wendall's (FA-Q) “proper” art career began when he moved to New York and became a graffiti artist in the 70’s and 80’s and where he changed billboards and advertisements by scraping out letters to give them new meanings. By the late 80’s he was considered a rising star in the contemporary art scene, living a rough life on the Lower East Side where he was involved with the Rivington School, made up of a group of metal sculptors, blacksmiths, painters, performance artists, and other outsiders who worked and met in abandoned courtyards on Rivington Street. Wendall’s work focuses on the depiction of faces that stray away from the normative of the figure and bring the view to a blending of color and shape forging on the abstract, leading the viewer to what is often silly, cynical, or reaching out from a turmoil that was created in turmoil and at times an intimate laughter and a vast spectrum of emotion felt and witnessed.

Heavily anti-establishment, FA-Q said, “We were against commercial art, and against capitalism, championing art for people.” He worked and lived on the Lower East Side for many years until his death in 2011.

Jason McLean was born in London, ON, in 1971. After attending H.B. Beal Secondary School, McLean graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver in 1997. Jason McLean’s diverse art practice includes sculpture, sound works, zines, book works, mixed-media installations, correspondence art, curatorial explorations, puppets, and performance, but he is probably best known for his diaristic mapping and surreal drawings and paintings. Inspirations fueling his daily observations are relationships with local and visited environments that create a body of work often described as mental maps, where samplings of his walking and street-level investigations are mashed-up into different poignant combinations of gesture, image and understanding. Grounded in family life as husband and father, McLean works by using humor to touch upon challenging subject matter, such as sadness, loss, displacement, and economic hardship. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at The National Gallery of Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Loyal Gallery in Malmo Sweden, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Franklin Parrish Gallery and Zieher Smith Gallery in New York City. He has worked in major collections throughout North America including the Museum of Modern Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Bank of Montreal Collection and the Royal Bank of Canada. McLean is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Canada, Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Back Gallery Project, Vancouver, Canada, and Van Der Plas Gallery, NYC.