The Covid-19 pandemic switched a dinner and movie night out to shared streaming and eating over devices, and while we remained connected, the distance between us was vast. Canberra artist Peter McLean was inspired by the digitisation of friendships in his new exhibition Distant Friends, on display at Megalo Print Studio until 25 March.

The portraits featured in the exhibition are of people the artist knows, taken from their social media pages, mostly with permission during a time when they couldn’t connect in person.

“We could have been old school and written letters, but mostly didn’t; we used digital tools to maintain those friendships,” he says.

Using a relief printing technique and the CYMK colour scheme, McLean used an unusual material in this practice, Lego. Wanting to use a medium that could be used time and time again, the artist constructed the printing tiles from the plastic bricks, with each portrait having 12 to 16 individual layers. 

“Normally, once you’ve carved an image on it, then it’s that image, you can reprint it, but you put another image on. This system means I build the image print from it and then that literally gets pulled apart,” he says.

At a distance the portraits are clear, then as you get closer, each image begins to blur, eyes lose their sparkle, becoming colours and squares. Much like how conversations over video were still possible, something about them became more distorted, so to with these pieces. McLean says our brain makes up the information.

“It’s about how keyed in we are to recognise faces, such as survival instinct to be able to recognise a face, hence why we see them in clouds and rocks and things where they’re not there.”

The project was supported by a Homefront grant from Arts ACT, introduced during the pandemic to help people like McLean whose work opportunities dried up. The funding enabled him to create the artworks from his home, studio, and on site at Megalo, creating four of each portrait – one for the subject, one for himself, and two to be displayed and sold.

“Sending a print to each person was also about reinforcing those relationships. Someone who I might have normally seen a couple of times of a year, that I now wasn’t, I had this relationship thing happening,” he says.

Distant Friends by Peter McLean is on at Megalo Print Studio, Kingston until 25 March; megalo.org

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