Headbones Gallery
Presents
Pee-bee – Says Goodbye
September 1 - September 21, 2025

The title of the exhibition is pee-bee Says Goodbye and the content is intimate, vulnerable and expressive. The man confidently meeting our gaze on the poster, ripped and steady, is Noah MacLeod. So, who is pee-bee?

“Every human being while he lives seeks to realize himself and does realize himself. With respect to beauty and art this receives the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically.”[1]

Noah Macleod first came into the public eye when all was silent; COVID was layered upon entrepreneurial prospects and the future was insecure for all. Yet in June 2021, Noah MacLeod started a business on the main street of Vernon. It was an ad-hoc cultural center that filled the yawning gap that had risen between the up-and-coming creatives and life at large during the pandemic shut-downs.  He called it Local Losers, a grand and what turned out to be successful use of irony. MacLeod managed to vanguard a group of young creatives who, despite the eventual loss of brick and mortar when Local Losers closed in June 2023 to become Local Losers Underground, have definitely ‘shown up’ on the local art scene.

“This skill in living an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as God-like geniality.”[2] Again Hegel hits a mark for, as if rising at each footfall, Noah continued on to successfully, again, operate and manage an event business, living his artistic life fully and in plurality.

 And yet … the drawings, the paintings, the messages (?) are dark …

It appears through the imagery that it is pee-bee who links into a drive towards plurality with varying degrees of intensity at the same time as Noah Macleod has dug deep in an attempt to understand the conversation that is taking place inside his mind with his erratic and influential AKA, pee-bee.  Is this a dialogue between Noah and a far less confident pee-bee or is pee-bee the personal expression of the essence of our age, as this generation feels it?

Reminded of the romantic period that fed on a full range of emotions, without which, they believed, a full understanding of existence could not be achieved, Noah Macleod as he strips pee-bee bare for all to contemplate, exposes his subjectivity and individualism.  Despite Macleod’s posture, which he backs up with technical acumen, there is something at work under the surface that necessitates exposure as “the subject desires to penetrate into truth and has a craving for objectivity but yet is unable to abandon its isolation and retirement into itself, and to strip itself free of this unsatisfied awkward abstractness of mind.” [3]

The question is whether in making art it is up to Noah to say it as he does or whether saying anything at all depends on Noah. The difference may seem picayune until there is a third choice – whether the decision between the up to or depends on is what constitutes the content.

Is Noah saying goodbye to pee-bee or are Noah and pee-bee leaving together and saying goodbye to us? 

________
[1] All quotes are from Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher during the romantic period whose ideas considered mysticism, love and art. 
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid

e Feught

 We look towards the far distant for a sense of something other than the hum-drum existence that often takes over our routine lives. Vacations, videos, reading, music – all become the escape routes to enrichment. Afar Per se fulfills the wanderlust and slakes the thirst for exoticism, transferring a National Geographic mind frame into the refined halls of high culture.

 Amar from Afar is actually residing and working quite close for his studio is in Lumby, BC – yet that fact could translate into a rather exotic imagining for a New Yorker. Headbones Gallery visited the artist’s studio in the fall and were rewarded with a revelation as expanding as that of visiting another country. Amar’s work is not static. It reaches backwards in time as it projects forward and seldom is there only a surface meaning. But this is not a plea for nostalgia or even a reinforcement of exotic otherness for Amar doesn’t let the image rest. He pokes at it, jabs at it with the dissonance of virtual life and in doing so pulls his visual story line into the theatrical realms. There is a taste of intrigue, plot, climax and even the potential for a narrative resolution. He gives us sufficient clues but doesn’t reveal the ending.

 Diane Feught’s actual past, present and future have rarefied beginnings. Feught grew up in an Anglican home. As an adult, she lived in a Buddhist priory in Edmonton for seven years where she experienced the lush overlap of philosophical, spiritual and cultural diversity while still living in the heart of a ‘typical’ Canadian milieu. Her oil paintings and gouaches leave room for study as well as speculation as to their narrative source. Often with a strong composition that supports the drama of the imagery, her technique – impeccable and practiced – supports the strangeness of her subjects by granting an immediate viability to the juxtaposition of elements. The overwhelming perfection and balance take over any doubt at the unusual imagery. Feught also backs her innuendos with information, detailing with a precision to provoke applause.

 Afar Per se - what does it mean? Per se does not only mean “intrinsically” but also, “by, of, for or in itself”. It seems a fitting description of the works of Amar from Afar and Diane Feught with all of the allusions to otherness that they inspire.

 The opening reception for Afar Per se is Friday, November 11, which is Remembrance Day and 11/11/11. Even the date is fittingly evocative yet cryptic.

 Trance and Nilt to cosmic Eastern sounds and melodies during the opening reception with Daniel Stark on sarode, Bill Boyd on cello and Gaz on guitar.