The Or Gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod. The exhibition’s title is derived from the book The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964) by R.M. Lockley, a book which in turn informed Richard Adams’ harrowing children’s novel, Watership Down (1972).

For her exhibition, MacLeod builds from these sources, incorporating an over-sized pair of rabbit ears (initially proposed as a public artwork), along with a rabbit hutch recreated from photographs of the plywood hutch her father built for her family’s pet rabbits in London, Ontario.

The Private Life of the Rabbit marks the fifth of a series of exhibitions and projects curated and produced by Mark Lanctôt and Jonathan Middleton under the title The Troubled Pastoral. The series takes on a broad set of themes including pessimism, psychedelia, altered states and drug use, black comedy, science-fiction dystopia, class struggle (within the context of an increasingly marginal or absent middle class), the industrialization of food production, the ragged edge of suburbia, and various forms of visual, aural, or perceptual interference, including smoke, static, and electro-magnetic radiation.