Jon Pylypchuk’s “I Got Love for You” exhibit at ArtCenter (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Reminding us of the thin line between life and death, Jon Pylypchuk’s exhibit, “I Got Love for You,” which opened on May 20th, is now on display in ArtCenter’s South Campus through August 19.
By Garrett Rowlan
The exhibit in the Peter and Merle Muffin Gallery features a recurrent motif: ghost-like figures are shaped vaguely like Pac Man dot chasers. According to the artist, they are McDonald’s takeout bags punctured and bronzed to suggest souls slipped from their bodies.
Pylypchuk, born in 1972, in Canada, to a 50-year-old father who’d fled from the Ukraine to escape a Russian gulag, told me he grew up around elderly parents. “Death was a part of life,” he said.
He confessed, however, that the years 2008-2019 relatively few passings, but COVID reawakened that childhood perception. Deaths, including that of his best friend, reminded him of those early experiences.
To walk through the gallery, then, is to feel, particularly when looking into the installation at the south end, where fluttering ghouls hover around a campfire, that the flip side of life is never far away.
Both sobering and exhilarating, “I Got Love for You,” left me feeling stronger for having seen it.
Jon Pylypchuk: I've Got Love for You Through August 19, 2023 Location Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery ArtCenter College of Design 1111 S. Arroyo Parkway Pasadena, CA 91105
Jon Pylypchuk’s Exhibit at ArtCenter (Garrett Rowlan)
(Photo – artcenter.edu)
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