Nestled presents selections from a series of intaglio prints by artist Meaghan Hyckie, produced as a part of the 2022 Smokestack Analog Print Residency.

Collaborating with Smokestack’s Master Printmaker, Laine Groeneweg, Hyckie undertook an intensive, introductory focus on aquatint etching and photopolymer gravure. The suite of new prints created during Hyckie’s residency experiment with the shifting of colour and tonal density through the unique properties of intaglio printmaking.

In a statement about the work, Meaghan shares:

Neighbourhood Watch signs have always interested me because of the peculiar way they communicate a threat while attempting to project a sense of security at the same time. The signs where I live in Southern Ontario feature three houses with giant eyeballs for windows, a pretty accurate visual summation of my suburban experience: an imagined safe space presenting an uneasy equilibrium between the vulnerabilities of individual freedom alongside the restrictions of collective scrutiny.

The houses I depict in my work are intensely personal, specific translations of my childhood suburban home, its windows and proportions. But they’re also not personal at all, given that this house form is so general it can be reduced to an icon, and that thousands of homes just like it were built across Canada as part of a federal initiative in the 1940s to provide affordable housing for veterans and their families. Through iterative manifestations of this imagery I try to abstract and articulate a rootless sense of disorientation in work that evokes complex social histories, at once sympathetic towards the utopian idealism these structures embody and critical of the colonial approach to nation-building they represent.

I love the house I grew up in, and I still visit there often. I like to take walks around the neighbourhood when the light is changing and the dynamic between who sees and can be seen from inside and outside shifts. I know this is a bit creepy. I also know that everyone does it. I’ve tried to channel this visual and emotional tension into these etchings, mixing unusual colour combinations with subtle tonal variations to create delicately tactile, optically vibrating prints that shift from feeling appealing to unsettling.

Meaghan Hyckie (b. 1983, Toronto) is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, and has exhibited work with Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal; Museum London; the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Hyckie has received numerous grants in support of her practice from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Her prints and drawings are held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum London, The Bailey Collection, BMO and RBC art collections, among others. Hyckie lives and works in Toronto.