Myfanwy MacLeod's Trophies unpacks frat-house history at Burnaby Art Gallery

A giant foam-resin donkey head—vandalized with messy red lipstick and blue eyeshadow—lies abandoned on a yellow-floral carpet at Burnaby Art Gallery, titled Pleasure Island and instantly evoking the bad-boy paradise from Pinocchio. It shares the gallery's exhibition space with a collage of far-flung touchstones: grease-stained pizza boxes, ceramic feet-shaped vases, vintage knuckle-buster gear shifts, and imagery of beer kegs and mythological characters.

In Myfanwy MacLeod's new exhibition Trophies, these disparate elements cohere into a site-specific exploration of masculine rites that draws a line from the Plato Academy and Ancient Greece through modern frat culture to the Trump era. The Vancouver artist wields humor undercut by darker tensions, tracing how male bonding rituals have been performed across history.

The inspiration begins with the gallery itself. The 1911 Arts and Crafts Ceperley Mansion—a charmingly restored home on Deer Lake's north shore—hosted the Grace and Henry Ceperley family, then functioned as a Benedictine monastery in the 1940s and later as home to the controversial Temple of the More Abundant Life cult. But MacLeod became fascinated by its final tenants: the Delta Upsilon fraternity, which inhabited the attic from 1965 to 1966, covering walls and doors with cryptic op-art graffiti and slogans.

When SFU banned fraternities and sororities in 1966, Delta Upsilon infamously resisted eviction with a protest party featuring an indoor bonfire. After they departed, the mansion was renovated into Burnaby Art Gallery as part of a Centennial project in 1967.

"There was this weird trajectory from a family home to a monastery to a cult headquarters and then a frat house," MacLeod said in a phone interview. "And there was something about that arc that seemed very typical in a funny way—it went from something quite domestic to something slightly sordid in a funny way."

What caught her attention initially was a photograph of one of the murals left by the frat boys. In 2014, gallery director-curator Jennifer Cane had the attic graffiti professionally documented before renovation tore out the walls. The labyrinthian graphic reminded MacLeod of a Frank Stella geometric print—an accidental parallel between frat-house scrawl and high modernism.

Cane, the exhibition's curator, notes MacLeod's directness. "Myfanwy hits hard with this body of work. I think it's difficult for artists to speak to our present moment because there is so much shock and awe, as well as fear. You can feel that in what people produce—safer things, hyper-conceptual things. I think the strength of this work is that it's quite literal, it's funny and it takes a position."

Trophies runs through August 30 at Burnaby Art Gallery.