Join us at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday, October 28th, from 6-8pm for a triple opening reception for M.E. Sparks' and a Rag in the Other, Whitney Brennan's a sound falls but leaves no bruise, and Marguerite MacIntosh's Closet Meditations.
This event is free and open to the public; registration is required. Light catering and drinks will be provided. Registration gets you one (1) free drink ticket. You can register for this event here.
We hope to see you there!
M.E. Sparks is an artist and educator currently living in Winnipeg, MB, Treaty 1 Territory. Her studio practice is rooted in mixed emotions: an unrelenting infatuation with painting and a critical distrust of its dominant history. As an inheritor and perpetuator of this history, she considers this internal conflict a generative place to begin.
and a Rag in the Other presents a series of draped canvas paintings by M.E. Sparks. This work explores the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting. 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.
Whitney Brennan is a sound artist and curator living on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She holds a Master of Arts in Art History: Critical & Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. Whitney is the Co-Director of Arts Assembly, a not-for-profit, community-centric arts organization that emphasizes artistic collaboration.
a sound falls but leaves no bruise explores sound, poetry, textiles, and the mediums’ relationships to anxiety and misophonia*. This exhibition invites audiences to ask questions about relationships between our senses of hearing and touch, and between sound and textiles.
Marguerite MacIntosh is an artist and retired architect in addition to being a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her works in acrylic, pencil and mixed media contemplate her own experiences of time and place and point to an awareness of the present moment and the liminal spaces in which we find ourselves. She lives with her husband and their dog Beau in Summerland, British Columbia.
Closet Meditations emerged as a project following Marguerite MacIntosh’s participation in the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art’s online exhibition The Assembly: Sustainability earlier this year and her reading of The Journal of John Woolman: an eighteenth-century Quaker whose writings challenged issues of his day that continue to plague contemporary life, often speaking of how the lure of luxury manifested in possessions, clothing, and travel can so easily override sound judgment. In this installation, MacIntosh examines the contents of her own closet and its preponderance of black clothing. She considers how she uses the clothes she buys and wears to inform her identity in myriad ways, usually distracted and detached from the implications of this consumption in terms of environmental destruction and worker exploitation.