Ian McPartland
Imaging the Infra-Ordinary

Systems, Memory, and the Poetics of Mediation

Ian McPartland is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice mobilises the aesthetics of infrastructure, surveillance, and machine vision to propose new critical relationships between image, labour, and attention. Working across digital media, painterly intervention, and conceptual installation, McPartland constructs a lucid and searching practice in which the ordinary is reframed as a site of poetic resistance and systemic critique.

In the spirit of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and the procedural poetics of artists such as Trevor Paglen and Tacita Dean, McPartland’s work foregrounds the apparatus—both technological and institutional—as an active agent in the construction of vision. Since 2023, a body of interlinked projects—Four Seasons, Oculi Terranum – Eyes Worldwide, Liminal Spaces, Umkämpfte Landschaften, Existential Reflection, Silver Punkt, Chairs Missing, and Vorticism Re-imagined—has emerged as a cumulative inquiry into the temporal, spectral, and contested nature of contemporary image production.

Their compositions often take the form of diptychs and matrix arrangements, allowing tension to play out between digital render and gestural mark, between the machinic and the human, the seen and the withheld. Here, McPartland draws not only on a foundation in graphic design and fine art but on a life lived within infrastructural and service environments—engagements which lend the work a granular materiality and a rare epistemic honesty.

Projects such as Subsumption and Surveillance Still-Life mark a deeper philosophical turn, engaging critically with the ethics of AI and spectatorship through richly composed juxtapositions of screen-based phenomena and analogue residue. These are not illustrative gestures but speculative diagrams: systems of thought embodied in image, akin to the archival architectures of Susan Hiller or the critical taxonomies of John Akomfrah.

McPartland’s participation in forums such as the Contemporary Art Academy has shaped their commitment to reflective, socially aware, and distributable modes of practice. Currently assembling interpretive materials and a portable pitch format for curatorial dialogue, the artist seeks to extend these conversations into discursive spaces where questions of sustainability, accessibility, and contemporary relevance are not ancillary but central.

McPartland’s work invites critical curatorial attention not as spectacle but as proposition: an invitation to consider how perception is mediated, and how the overlooked might yet become legible in the flicker between image and system, surface and structure, gesture and code.