The MAC, McMillan Arts Centre in Parksville BC is located in the old turn of the century schoolhouse on Jensen. They recently repurposed the children’s cloakroom into a digital corridor, six TV monitors showcasing local artists. The theme for the next few weeks is “SURFACING”, a digital exhibit exploring the themes of surfacing from isolation and fear to renewal and emerging hope. Seeing as most of you are not travelling too much lately, here is the video I’ve included in the show.

Now showing the the McMillan Arts Centre, summer of 2020

About the artwork

• Hairdressers Run with Scissors: For some reason, many of us stuck at home during Covid-19 were utterly concerned with reopening businesses that catered to our vanity. It seems we wanted haircuts, manicures and tattoos. ??? In this tessellation, I combined two surface patterns, my original hairdresser tessellation called Fifi at the Salon with this new one called Hairdressers run with Scissors. All of them in a hurry to re-open. Running with scissors is dangerous is what our parents told us. Listen to your elders.
• Wash Your Hands: Another repetitive order coming from our Mom ‘n Dad. A little more important in 2020. Pay attention. Do it.
• Kharraquan Five: I derived this nested shape of five characters from a classic Islamic Geometric Design I learned a few years ago. The video shows that any straight line geometric nested shape can be tweaked at will using KaleidoPaint, my favourite app. Coming soon to Skillshare.
• We Need a Vaccine: This one is not a true tessellation by definition, as it has open spaces, it is more along the lines of a pattern. But it is important in this series.
• Black Lives Matter: This tessellation showed up later than the above four. I believe it was helped into being by people’s pent up energy at being in lock-down as well as Mr. Floyd’s sad death. I sincerely hope mighty change occurs because of the worldwide movement.

Brian Middleton’s artwork for the show’s poster shown below