How to Play a Winning Game Your Natural Way

This major retrospective addresses four decades of the career of North American artist Billy J. McCarroll. McCarroll began in California in the 1960s as a ceramic artist in the context of Funk art along with Peter Voulkos and David Gilhooly. His works were irreverent and infused with humour, and when mixed with the slick surfaces of Los Angeles' hot rod culture, uniquely his own. Arriving in Alberta in 1971, it was a straight line from his ceramic works coated in industrial paint to his Clome paintings where automotive lacquer on Plexiglas brought an ironic playfulness to Hard-edge painting. In the 1980s, his work became inextricably bound to the image of Sam Snead and the sundry accoutrement of golf. Illustrated with key examples of McCarroll's most significant bodies of work from the 1970s to today, three essays reveal how many of the strategies he employs involve cultural and artistic reconfiguration, quotation and transformation.