Meaghan Hyckie – Gathering

Neighbourhood Watch signs interest me because of the peculiar way they communicate a threat while attempting to project a sense of security at the same time. The signs where I live in Ontario feature three houses with giant eyeballs for windows, a visual summation of my suburban experience: an imagined safe space presenting an uneasy equilibrium between the vulnerabilities of individual freedom alongside the restrictions of collective scrutiny.

The houses I depict are intensely personal translations of my childhood home, its windows and proportions. But they’re also not personal at all, given that this house-form is so general it can be reduced to an icon, and that thousands of homes just like it were built across Canada to provide affordable housing for WWII veterans and their families. Through iterations of this imagery I try to visualize a rootless sense of disorientation in work that evokes complex social histories, at once sympathetic towards the utopian idealism these structures embody and critical of the colonial approach to nation-building they represent.

I love the house I grew up in and still visit there. I like to take walks around the neighbourhood when the light is changing and the dynamic between who sees and can be seen shifts. I know this is creepy. I also know that everyone does it. I’ve tried to channel this visual and emotional tension into my work. Form and space deteriorate into patterns, shapes and lines, abstracting and articulating the boundaries between the inside and the outside.