“Okanagan artist, Noah MacLeod, saying goodbye through new exhibit”

Castanet News / August 2025

“Vernon’s Noah MacLeod to sell his self-designed tees at Record City”

Vernon morning Star - March 2017

Commentary written by Julie Oakes, in reference to the show “Pee-bee says goodbye” 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.” 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.” 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.”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?

written by Julie Oakes, on the work of pee-bee 2022

Vacillating between the inner and outer life, between meaning and questioning, using words and imagery, surface and depiction- Noah MacLeod's paintings are jam-packed. Or jamming in 'packed-ness' as if riffing on the nature of stuff. Created in a semblance of humanity, though bulbous, deformed and unusually specific, the subjects of these portraits seem to all be members of a symbiotic clan. Their expressions are not threatening, while in their individuality, they appear vulnerable, open and familiar. They defy understanding - not an easy read - and the imagery is not without attendant rudeness. It is just complicated. MacLeod has given written clues to thoughts, but he hasn't made deconstruction easy. The tininess of much of the leering speaks of care, and, hard to read, maintains an almost protective stance towards the sharing of the message. These formulations of humankind engender respect, not only due to MacLeod's craftsmanship and the dedication to detail but due also to their nonconformity, a personal expression of a unique, admirable mind