Erin McGean is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist based near Toronto whose practice is built on an obsessive engagement with images from the past. Working primarily in handmade collage, she carefully sources and curates vintage printed matter from mid-century books, magazines, and portraiture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, treating the physical material itself as central to the work. The search for the right image is as much a part of the practice as what is done with it, hours spent moving through printed matter, building a personal archive of fragments that carry weight, history, and visual potential.
Her compositions often work with just one or two images, or multiples of the same image, sometimes simply juxtaposed to generate new meaning through proximity and contrast, and other times subjected to strict rule-based systems of cutting, layering, and repetition that push a single source image to its limits. Across both approaches, the hand is always present. The work is slow, deliberate, and deeply process-driven, producing compositions that feel simultaneously archival and contemporary, familiar and newly strange.
This physical practice extends into animation, augmented reality, and code-based work, where she applies the same investigative spirit to digital forms, exploring how images shift, loop, and accumulate meaning when set in motion or embedded in new contexts. Whether working by hand or through a screen, the questions at the heart of the practice remain consistent: what does an image carry, what happens when it is broken apart, and what new life can be found in the reassembly.
Erin studied Fine Art at York University and has been working in collage for over twenty years. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and international art fairs across North America and is held in private and corporate collections across Canada and beyond
