Partners in Art is proud to support Philip Leonard Ocampo’s project Key Dawn taking place May 17th – August 31st, as a part of Milestone Nerve. This exhibition features work by Philip Leonard Ocampo, Yan Wen Chang, Brandon Fujimagari, Andrew Harding, and Josi Smit. This project will be on view at The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington.
Gathering a selection of sculptures, paintings, images, and site-specific interventions, Milestone Nerve adopts tenacity as essential to witnessing, navigating, and making sense of precarious generational shifts, collective upheaval and reckoning. This group exhibition poses how we might firmly orient ourselves in a world that changes continuously, suddenly, and even catastrophically.
Presented as a part of this group exhibition, Key Dawn is a large scale, wall mounted sculpture appearing as a scaled-up set of objects spread out to resemble a sun with keys and charms pointing outward like its rays. Embodying the direct action and bold radicality of 1970s/1980s punk subcultures, this brazen, chaotic, and rebellious era of visual culture boasts inspiring ideologies of power, anti-authoritarianism and mutual-aid. The keys and charms of this work echo the pins, chains, keys, and ephemera sprawled across punk clothing. Collecting them into a sun-like shape alludes to fluttering, teeming potentials of life; and thereby, hopeful and bold futures.
Philip Leonard Ocampo (b.1995) is an artist and arts facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Ocampo’s multidisciplinary practice involves painting, sculpture, writing, and curatorial projects. Exploring worldbuilding, radical hope, and speculative futures, Ocampo’s work embodies a curious cross between magic wonder and the nostalgic imaginary. Following the tangents, histories, and canons of popular culture, Ocampo is interested in how unearthing cultural touchstones of past/current times may serve as catalysts for broader conversations about lived experiences—personal, collective, diasporic, etc. He holds a BFA in Integrated Media (DPXA) from OCAD University (2018) and is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre and one of the four founding co-directors of Hearth, an artist-run collective based in the city.
