Andrew James McKay’s Provisional Realism is comprised of six pictures — two landscapes and four portraits. The landscapes can be further divided into urban and rural settings (Expansion Project and Sunshine Coast Highway, respectively), while the portraits run the gamut — from self-portraiture (Impersonator), to staged direction (Showroom), to conceptual (Alisa with Textile), to meta (The Woodshop). Though the paintings align easily with realist criteria, their provisional status requires some thinking.

A first thought concerns an instance where landscape and portraiture meet in a single work, as in the mural portrait that appears in the Expansion Project landscape. This mural, which centres the words “THE PRESENT” across its figure’s chest, was a project of the now-defunct Vancouver Mural Festival, a controversial non-profit accused of “art-washing.” [1] As with many VMF projects, murals were commissioned with no guarantee of permanence. Although we could refer to them as provisional (existing temporarily, or in the present), the provisional aspect assumed in Expansion Project (Vancouver’s five-year Broadway Subway Line expansion) is in reality closer to an operative protraction than anything fleeting: a scenario in which governments and market forces collude to neo-liberally manipulate both time and space for profit, in a city young and ruthless enough to be cursed, like Modernism, with forever making itself new.