Malcolm McCormick’s “Restricted Immersion”

The concrete-and-glass austerity of Afternoon Projects on Vancouver’s Powell Street — a palimpsest of Coast Salish wetlands and Japanese Canadian histories — is not a neutral shell but a device that scripts attention. McCormick’s composite paintings meet this device head-on, refusing to let immersion erase the room that produces it. He thus directly engages a question central to contemporary debates: Can embodied experience remain critical without sacrificing sensory immediacy? The works propose a material, rather than theoretical, answer.