This painter is looking for meaning at the amusement park
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Painter Philip Leonard Ocampo has always been obsessed with amusement parks. As a child, his siblings said he'd have "stars in his eyes" whenever they drove past a parking lot carnival. Just last year, the Toronto-based artist-curator went to Canada's Wonderland six times.
"I really like roller coasters," he says, "because it's the closest I'm ever gonna get to flying."
In a new body of work, Ocampo explores the amusement park as a strange, entertaining and beguiling "site of becoming" — the kind of place where you might form exciting new connections with yourself and others amid the promise of fun and fantasy.
For CBC Arts' In Process, Ocampo invites viewers into his studio as he completes one of the final artworks — a gigantic ferris wheel combining painting and photography — for the spring exhibition Thrill Seekers (feat. Hannah Doucet) at 36 Claremont Project Space in Toronto.
Watch the full episode below.
Ocampo's paintings often include "seemingly miscellaneous objects in strange riddle-like configurations." Putting these articles — like board game pieces, tchotchkes and other recognizable items from the recent past — into a conversation, the images invite interpretation, much like tarot cards.
"My work is a cross between magic and the nostalgic imaginary," he says. "How we remember time is really variable and kind of mysterious and non-linear. Nostalgia is a way to look critically back at the past, and also to make sense of it as someone who is feeling the effects of it and the spectre of it years after."
The ferris wheel is an emblem of Ocampo's interest in time and nostalgia. It is a tremendous cycle, both beautiful and thrilling, that takes many people along for the ride.
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