Kegan McFadden

“It took me two years to leave my two-decades-long relationship. Sometime midway through the first of those years I’d began collecting pictures of men in pairs with their backs to the camera. These are images of men, boys, friends, fathers and sons, brothers, lovers, team mates, models, colleagues and coworkers, uniformed, naked, casual, impossibly staged, but all in pairs. I stole them from Instagram over the course of one year, screen-grabbing them one at a time. I slowly built up a cache of photos featuring these men walking or facing away from the camera lens, turning their backs on the world and into themselves. I accumulated five hundred of these images. When you begin to look for something, it becomes all you can see — getting in the way of what is actually there.”  – Kegan McFadden, A Separate Peace

Composed of 500 screencaptures with an accompanying essay, A Separate Peace is at once an artistbook and an experiment in autotheory. McFadden’s long standing investigation into the overlapping lines of the homosocial, which has played out in projects that blur memory and taxonomy, comes full circle here with this tome, the artist’s largest project-in-print to date. 

Writer, curator, and artist Kegan McFadden has worked within and around the genre of artistbooks since 2001 when he started the micropublishing house, As We Try & Sleep Press.  As an artist, his output has been varied but often relies on the memory of interpersonal connections through a queer lens and incorporates a mixture of text and image as well as modest means of production. Over the past decade and a half, Kegan has worked with Canada’s artist-run centres, with projects having taken shape in written and physical form across this country. In 2020, HOTAM Press (Vancouver) produced Partners in Crime — a fifteen year survey of McFadden’s printed matter and related projects. This is Kegan’s first project with flask.