QUADRICHROMIE 1978-1988

Scott MacLeay (2018) - 120 pages

QUADRICHROMIE 1978-1988 traces the evolution of Scott MacLeay’s analog color work undertaken in Vancouver and Paris from 1978 to 1988, work that laid the foundation for his experimental projects in contemporary music and his ongoing explorations in the field of new media art. The book includes a representative selection of the images from the three four-colour series created during this early stage of their career: ATTITUDES, FRAGMENTS and WAVELENGTH. Speaking of his work during this period, MacLeay noted, “Not surprisingly, as time passed during this first decade of work, my early predisposition for planning images down to the last detail gave way to a growing interest in not knowing precisely where I was going, progressively integrating chance as a key parameter in order to more effectively explore the sensation of being lost, attributing to this state of grace, the power to provoke the vulnerability I had always sought to portray.”Writing about Macleay’s universe, New York art critic Allen Ellenzweig stated, In fact, I was struck that MacLeay was a photographer at all. He had jumped the boundary so many nineteenth-century Pictorialists hoped to transgress, passing from artisan to artist.... He employed his camera, his models, his color, and his sparse compositions, to fashion images of such stringent economy and grace that they achieve not the bombast of the epic poem, but the telling whisper of the haiku.”