Erin McGean is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist based near Toronto whose practice centers on handmade collage. She sources and cuts vintage printed matter, mostly mid-century books, magazines and portraiture from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, juxtaposing or rule-based cutting, layering and repeating source images until they feel at once archival and newly strange.
McGean studied Painting, Drawing and Art History at York University in Toronto, earning an Honors BFA, and later completed a B.Ed. at Brock University. She lives in Oakville, Ontario, where she also teaches high school visual arts.Originally trained as a painter, she first experimented with digital collage made from her own iPhone photos before returning to the tactile process of analog collage, working in the medium for more than twenty years.,
Her physical practice extends into animation, augmented reality and code, applying the same investigative approach to how images shift and accumulate meaning when set in motion.For the ongoing series Beyond Recognition, she built Grid Lab, an app she developed using Claude to extend her hand-cutting process into software, cutting scanned source images into grid-like patterns until a face slips out of reach.Her series Dataset reorganizes images through a precise, rule-based system of repetition and interference, a structured approach she has compared to the logic of AI training models while keeping it grounded in the human impulse to collect and make sense of the past.
In Smoke and Mirrors, she refracts old Hollywood through dissected portraits, including Cover Girrrrrl, which reimagines Rita Hayworth through a fragmented lens to examine the illusions Hollywood stardom projects.,Her series You Dont Bring Me Flowers, begun during the pandemic, juxtaposes vintage nude photography with vases of flowers to question the male gaze and societal expectations of femininity.Represented by Lustre Contemporary,she has exhibited at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fairand her work has been shown internationally, including at Space 55 Gallery in Seoul and at SuperChief Gallery at the Oculus in New York.
