Forgotten Legends In the Land Of The Hyper Surreal: Our Q&A With Alex McLeod

Alex McLeod is a Canadian 3D artist who uses digital tools to create hyper surreal landscapes, which will have an air of uncanny familiarity to anyone who’s ever virtually set foot inside a video game. Shiny digital surfaces coat the bulbous, soft geometry of a Super Mario World background, and castles lie barricaded on top of their foam kingdoms. These fantastical landscapes are tweaked into life using the modern animators artillery of Cinema 4D, Photoshop, and AfterEffects.

But these busy virtual worlds, populated by crystal mountains and chromatic bubble-clouds, also retain a high-gloss kitsch, the same kind that coats the pop art of Takashi Murakami or Jeff Koons, giving them a glistening psychedelia. Beginning this coming Saturday 26th May and running to 23rd June 2012 the Galerie Trois Points in Montreal, Quebec will host a solo show by McLeod called Légendes oubliées. The show will feature a selection of his work in print and video, so you can bask in its digital aura in the flesh, as it were.

Previously influenced by the environments in role playing and adventure games like Lighthouse, Diablo, and Warcraft II, we asked him a few questions to find out what was influencing his latest work.

The Creators Project: Firstly, what’s the show about. A quick Google translate of the title Légendes oubliées tells me it means “forgotten legends.” Can you elaborate?
Alex McLeod: Correct. I wanted to choose a title that was somewhat familiar and yet referenced nothing in particular, which is a sense I try to instill in the work. Essentially the work is about interconnected/cycled matter, which is not specific to time and place, yet a familiar idea. I thought by pairing a somewhat fantastical title, it would help the viewer understand where the work was coming from, which is really anywhere.

Blood Clouds

Blood Clouds Sequel

Can you explain a bit about how you created some of the works, the ones you sent me in the pics. Are they videos or prints, interactive, etc?
The pictures I sent are all prints, 40″×60″ or 36″×36″. There will also be a video piece in the show Sacred Forest Trip. The works in this show are a little different because I was very interested in pattern and how, through distortion, it can create form. Perhaps the environments aren’t anything more than wallpaper applied in another way. It all came out of a conversation I had with a couple of my friends about those Magic Eye books that we grew up with.

Sacred Forest Trip

The Roy Orbison line “a candy-colored clown they call the sandman” comes to mind when I look at your work. What do you hope to invoke in the viewer when they look at one of your pieces?
I want my audience to feel like they “get it.” As if there was no barrier between their own and this digital view. It’s very important to me that people aren’t excluded from what I do. I want everyone to feel like they can connect if they desire it.

Magic Eye 3

Magic Eye

Your work looks wonderful as animations, but would you like to create a physical installation if you could? A room decorated to look like one of your hyperreal images that you could step into?
Thank you! I would love to design spaces, but rather than recreate the work verbatim in real life, it would be more successful to approach that idea from more of an anthropomorphic/environmental-considered starting point. Like a mountain shaped coffee table, if that was even possible. It is my dream to collaborate with designers and architects in the future. That being said, I love collaborating with anyone especially in another discipline. I think a lot more ground can be covered when people with different backgrounds team up.

Cloud Birth

Cloud Birth 2

Cloud Mountain

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