Calla McInnes: It Wasn’t Love

In their practice, McInnes recurrently attends to the psychology of perception. Their diluted portraiture often revolves around a single representational feature – a profile of a chin, a torso, a pair of glasses, depicting silhouetted subjects turned from the viewer’s gaze. The same image is often recounted, treated with slight variations, as if rehearsals or varying versions of the same song. This recurrence of subject appears in “It Wasn’t Love”, where five works depict the same cropped view of a reclining figure wearing a shirt with the text “Boise” across its front. Intentionally cropped or retracted, their fragmented language of portraiture is more reminiscent of a glimpse in peripheral vision than incisive representation. These meditations on perception are at the heart of McInnes’ images, where fore- and background often commingle on the surface, the scene and the system of perspective itself rendered fluid.