and a Rag in the Other was a series of draped canvas paintings by M.E. Sparks exhibited in the Alternators Main Gallery from October 28 - December 10, 2022. This work explored the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting.

Working primarily with un-stretched canvas, Sparks cut images from art history to bring them into her own line of vision. Through a process of quotation, deconstruction and collage, the paintings in this exhibition felt somewhat like incomplete sentences. Modular and layered, they resist a finished state while implying the possibility of future reorganization.

In her practice, Sparks pulls apart and rearranges borrowed forms, many of which are taken from historical depictions of youth and femininity within the prickly territory of modernist painting. Rather than present a linear narrative, this mode of reassembly aims to temper expectations of legibility and interrupt an immediate reading of the image. The paintings become more about not knowing, of not being able to pin down or define, and of both the vulnerability and transformative potential that emerge when there is no clear image and no clear answer.

Through layers, curling edges, and a revealing of the painting’s underside, the work in this exhibition confronts the presumed fixedness and solidity of the flat picture plane. Sparks explores the material possibilities of draped canvas as a way to call into question painting’s limiting dichotomies (front vs. back, abstraction vs. figuration, image vs. object) while introducing a softness and provisionality to the painted image.

On December 3rd, 2022, Katherine Pickering met with M.E. Sparks over Zoom to discuss her exhibition of new work at the Alternator Center for Contemporary Art. This is an excerpt of that conversation.

Katherine Pickering: Could you start by telling me about the change to working with the cut-outs, and how this affected your process?

M.E. Sparks: That was the big shift a few years ago. I had to learn from the ground up just how to physically handle the cut-outs, because un-stretched oil-painted canvas is really fragile. My studio mate would often remind me that there's a reason why paintings are stretched! There's a reason we've used this system over centuries. I'm definitely using canvas in a way it doesn’t want to be used. It misbehaves a lot, and that has been difficult, but also an exciting negotiation that keeps me in the studio. I have had to think about painting in a new way: sculpturally rather than just pictorially.

M.E. Sparks *and a Rag in the Other* in the Main Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, October 28 - December 10, 2022.

The cut-outs have an open quality that feels more provisional than your other paintings. What’s exciting to you about working with shapes of layered imagery?

I didn’t start the cut-outs thinking that they would turn into such an open and playful process of constant destruction and transformation. By using the modular canvas pieces, this never-ending rearrangement of shape and colour started to emerge, as well as the reusing of older pieces in new orientations and combinations. This became such a freeing process; the canvases could keep living by being cut apart and painted over many times. It wasn’t necessary to keep producing something from scratch. I've always had a bit of anxiety around this production of new object after new object. But, with some of the cut-outs, there is actually a threshold when a shape becomes so particular that it can’t really be transformed into something else. It settles into its identity, in a way. But with the other larger swaths of colour and pattern, I’m able to reuse and transform these into different, more specific shapes as I continue to develop new work.

“It goes against our assumptions of what a painting should be. I love painting and I'll continue making stretched paintings, but I've always been resistant to them as these kind of commodified luxury objects.”

This show includes the largest number of cut-outs that I have made so far, so there was an interesting balance between reusing canvas pieces from past works and producing new canvas pieces. Now I’m thinking of how these can be transformed for the next iteration, and in a sense, it takes a load off my shoulders. So yes, this process of reusing and transforming allows the pieces to be more provisional, and more sustainable for my own practice. It goes against our assumptions of what a painting should be. I love painting and I'll continue making stretched paintings, but I've always been resistant to them as these kind of commodified luxury objects. The moment you have a finished painting it has this gloss to it - it’s no longer re-workable. I wanted the work in this show to feel less glossy, a little bit more rugged or something. The work resists being finished.

What effect do the cut-outs have on your approach to image?

One thing that I started to do with the cut-outs is work with Photoshop. These painted canvas pieces are really large, and they take quite a long time to dry before I am able to cut into them. Throughout the process of waiting for the oil paint to dry, stretching and gessoing new pieces of canvas, and collecting imagery, I work on Photoshop to play around with how the layered compositions can be formed. While it only gets me so far, it’s a great way to start figuring things out. It has led into a more cut and paste visual language in both the cut-outs and in my stretched paintings. I also like using really crappy, pixelated jpeg images that give me unexpected colour ideas and different mark-making ideas. It doesn't become a copy or a replica of that pixelated jpeg, but it leads me somewhere where I wouldn't have normally found myself. I quite like working within the digital realm and seeing its subtle influences within the paintings later on.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about with the cut-outs and my approach to image is how the process of cutting and layering promotes a merging or collapsing of disparate source material. The cut-outs fall into the realm of collage, and therefore give me so much room to piece together fragments of pictures that don’t necessarily belong side by side, or in this case, on top of one another. This collaged image would feel more permanent in a fixed, static painting, but with the cut-outs, the image is more momentary and malleable.

How did you decide to drape the cut-outs on dowels that are suspended from the ceiling?

The first time I draped the cut-outs was in a very sweet artist-run space, Ou Gallery in Duncan, BC, which had a long hallway space with a low angled ceiling. Suspending from the ceiling just felt right for that kind of smaller, intimate space. The viewer encountered each cut-out one-by-one as they moved down the hallway. Before that show, the wall had been the primary support for my canvas cut-outs, which felt restrictive. It shared too much of the same language with the stretched paintings because it wasn't breaking from that flat pictorial space.

I think by hanging the cut-outs from the ceiling, they become these awkward, bodily obstacles to navigate around. In this show, they are so large they really obstruct the space of the gallery, creating hiding spots - almost like room dividers or privacy screens. I wanted to make them at this large scale so that the viewer could really feel like they become immersed in each piece, or at least can disappear behind them.

It’s also important to me that the pieces have two sides. I think this really makes them a different kind of object than a painting. Both sides are activated, equally important to the whole work. As the cut-outs develop, what I consider “front” and “back” of each work is constantly shifting. If one of the canvas pieces happens to be more image-based (like the image of an arm holding a rose), the image is then often obscured by the act of draping it over the dowel - splitting it in half almost. You need to walk around to both sides of the work to see the whole image. This kind of obscuring or splitting of an image is an important method of abstraction in the show.

The cut-outs remind me of clothing draped over the back of a chair. I think sometimes, with painting, we forget that the material support is fabric.

Yes, I was thinking about that a lot for this recent work, and I was intentionally looking at textile patterns in either the historical paintings I was referencing, as well as just from my own life and my mom’s collection of fabrics. These textile patterns found their way into this show, for example, the geometric patterns, the cherries, the polka dots. It felt like it made sense to reference these fabrics, firstly because much of the reference imagery I use includes dresses, skirts and pieces of clothing from historical artworks, but also because I want to acknowledge the fabric of the canvas itself. While I’m not a quilter, I feel like I’m ever so slightly tapping into this lineage of sewers in my family by working with the canvas as a fabric, rather than simply a substrate.

In addition to the exhibition in the gallery, there’s also an online component. Could you tell me about how these two works are connected.

The online piece is called in_your_painting, and is actually one of a few browser-based works I’ve developed that explore collage through language. The piecing together of disparate words is very similar to how I piece together my paintings; fragments of images from different sources, all coming together to create a new sentence of sorts, which may not always be completely whole or completely legible.

For in_your_painting I was also thinking about what it felt like to move through someone else's private space as a metaphor for appropriating imagery from the historical paintings I use. It feels like I’m entering into another person’s headspace, which is intrusive, but also thrilling. This idea also makes me think of childhood memories of looking through my mom's closet when she wasn't home. It’s kind of exciting, intimate and also risky. The website is meant to capture that feeling of moving through a space that you maybe shouldn't be in.

The website can be accessed with a QR code, which I included in a small printed booklet that gives you a kind of glimpse of the website’s collaged text. When you’re on the site, every time you click there is a new random generation of words, which follow a repeated narrative structure. I will say, this is a very simple exploration of programming and code. The words are all sampled from a large archive of historical painting titles - many Balthus’ painting titles, so you get a lot of “young girls”, “mirrors”, “cats” and “flowers”. And there are a few other word lists thrown in there, some coming from the titles of fabric patterns that I have been referencing - like “houndstooth” and “paisley". So, it's a smorgasbord of words that are randomly sampled to “fill in the blank”. While the narrative structure repeats, the keywords keep changing. Sometimes it’s nonsensical and sometimes it's oddly fitting. While the reader may feel like they’re moving through someone else’s space, I also wanted them to feel confident and in control, perhaps even a bit too confident (for example, eating food from someone’s kitchen and not doing your dishes).

“I’m trying to think about how to manipulate language in the same way I manipulate images, where these familiar forms become unfamiliar and unexpected.”

There are many layers to this online piece. I’m trying to think about how to manipulate language in the same way I manipulate images, where these familiar forms become unfamiliar and unexpected. I have often thought about abstraction as the moment when an image becomes like a word you repeat too many times: strange sounding and awkward in your mouth. The website piece seems to get me to this same place of discovery and discomfort.

While we're talking about language, would you discuss how you title these works?

Titling the cut-outs is not easy, because in the studio they're changing right up until the last minute. Taking a big swath of canvas and draping it on top of another piece can obscure the shape underneath and change the work completely. So, I have a hard time grasping a title, because the works are unfixed for so long. Whereas in a painting I usually get a title in my head halfway through as I start to figure out what the painting is going to be. With the cut-outs, it's a slower process.

When I do get to a place of figuring out titles, I often think about language that can imply something other than what's happening on the surface. It's funny, with the stretched paintings the titles are burned into my brain. I never forget them, and with the cut-outs I do forget them - I think because of that unfixed quality they have. But the title is still important, even if it’s more provisional. Usually, the words that pop into my head are references to what this form could look like, but doesn’t really get you all the way there. It’s a hint. Admittedly, some titles are more direct, like “Rose Offering”, where there's a hand holding what could be a rose. For that work I chose a direct title because the image is partially obscured, so I wanted to give a suggestion of what is being hidden behind the layers. I often wonder, how frustrated will the viewer be? How much information should I give to them about this form or its reference image? Do I need to do that or not, and if not, does the work still pull the viewer in, still ask to be looked at and considered? It's always a kind of a negotiation of how much to give away, and how much to keep to myself.

Remind me what some of the other titles are.

There is a piece called “Signaling Something.” Again, it almost leads you to a dead end. The form in this work is a hand holding a mirror, but the mirror feels very opaque and generalized. It could be anything. The hand is showing you something, so there is this intention there, but these big pieces of colour obscure any potential information that could fill in the missing pieces. There's something being told, there's something signalled, but we can't get to that final piece of the puzzle. Maybe we're on the other side of the curtain from what's happening on stage.

And there are a lot of hands in the cutouts…

I was referencing a lot of dress shapes from historical paintings in my previous work, and I was finding that the negative spaces around the dresses always contained the silhouettes of hands and limbs. For this new body of work at the Alternator, I wanted to move away from the dress shapes, but still look at the figures represented in these historical paintings. I became quite interested in what the kind of archetypical figure of the “young girl” is often holding. There are so many mirrors. I guess we hold a lot of mirrors as young girls, as well as roses and fruit.

The title of the show is “and a Rag in the Other.” Like the text-based website piece, I was thinking of an incomplete sentence, and how we automatically try to fill in the blanks. I was thinking of all the potential phrases that the title could be: “A mirror in one hand and a rag in the other”; “A rose in one hand and an orange in the other.” I wanted the title of the show to be incomplete and for the narrative to be open-ended. I do use the word “rag” in the title, rather than rose or something else, because I was thinking specifically of these pieces of painted canvas as being reused and cut from a larger whole, similar to the “rag” or “scrap”. I think the rag is also a gendered object, and the word itself has an interesting array of connotations.

In terms of your art-historical references, are you looking at a particular time period?

In general, I've been working with early to mid-twentieth-century paintings. Modernist figurative painting, for the most part. As a painter, I'm interested in the space within those paintings and the flattening of form and depth. I'm aware of the limitations of my own scope of references, as they are predominately Eurocentric, but I’m using that because it's the history I know, and it’s the history I want to pull apart in a critical way. I’m able to insert my own voice into that space. I’m also interested in this moment in history because it’s really not that far back in time. I think a lot about how I feel as if I can see my own familial history in these paintings. I look at this work by Balthus from 1955 of three young sisters in a living room, and I think of my own mother and her sisters sitting in that same room, or wearing those same kinds of dresses. It's a history that feels intimate and not so far removed. And because of this closeness I feel, I really want to dig into the tension of using these historical paintings that are problematic and that represent the female body through this patriarchal lens. This is one reason why cutting, literally slicing, into these images feels so good!

I’m curious about how people interact with these works, I'd love to watch people encounter them.

When I was installing next to the large windows leading to the public walkway, passersby would often do a double take - perhaps thinking “oh, that's not an object I'm familiar with”. This was exciting, because I do think a lot about if the viewer will feel invited to approach this work.

In this show, the layered canvases don’t sit super flat. They curl a little bit, revealing gaps and shadowy spaces where you can see other pieces layered underneath. I would love for people to investigate, to use their bodies and move around the hanging canvases to look into the gaps and the cracks. They’re dimensional, they sway, they have a front and a back and a kind of inside as well, so I hope that people get up close and look into that deeper interior space.

I also think there's something interesting in having a work that is hiding something - a work that is enveloping itself. There’s something being obscured, and perhaps this can encourage a slower investigation of the object, the image and its surface. I think about how, especially in the age of Instagram and TikTok, we scroll and scroll and become accustomed to the speed and immediacy of easy-to-consume images. When I find myself doing that I'm immediately put into the mindset of “I don't want to be a painter, I don't want to add to this sea of visual information.” So, for me, this work is a way to slow down, to interrupt, reuse and reframe the image in, hopefully, an unexpected or perhaps less comfortable, easy-to-consume way. A stumbling way that is not smooth scrolling. Maybe it’s about the interruption of shallow looking.

Katherine Pickering is an artist and a Lecturer with the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan. Pickering received her BFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in 2006, and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montreal in 2009. Past exhibitions include Fort Gallery (Fort Langley), Kelowna Art Gallery Airport Gallery (Kelowna), Headbones Gallery (Vernon), Lake Country Art Gallery (Lake Country), Winsor Gallery (Vancouver), Populus Tremula Gallery (Iceland), Ajijic Cultural Centre (Mexico), Art Mûr (Montreal), Simotas House (Istanbul), and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna).

and a Rag in the Other // An Interview with M.E. Sparks

“It goes against our assumptions of what a painting should be. I love painting and I'll continue making stretched paintings, but I've always been resistant to them as these kind of commodified luxury objects.”

“I’m trying to think about how to manipulate language in the same way I manipulate images, where these familiar forms become unfamiliar and unexpected.”

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