Mary

Sandra Meigs

January 27 to March 4, 2006

In Mary, a series of 13 painted diptychs, Meigs covers the emotional and literal landscape of lost love, mutable narratives, general and specific longing, using as her point of departure the lyrics to “Sad Waters” by Nick Cave. On the left side of each painting Meigs abstracts source material inspired by the landscape around Drumheller and the Red Deer River while on the right she presents a distillation of the female portrait form. The canvases in their material presence act as a revelatory continuum—placid and undisturbed ground gives way to a gestural frenzy of surface concerns: a shift in the gaze from yearning to dejection and back again.

Sandra Meigs’ artistic career has spanned three decades and encompassed performance, writing and filmmaking while her recent work has marked her as one of Canada’s most important contemporary painters. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation, the Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant, the Saidye Bronfman Centre, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam and included in the Bologna and Sydney Biennales. Meigs’ work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ydessa Hendeles Collection, as well as many private collections. Her upcoming exhibitions include The Ontology of the Imaginative Realm at the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto in February 2006 and The McIntyre Ranch Project at the Illlingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary in March, 2006. Meigs lives in Victoria, BC, where she is a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria.