At Winchester Galleries on Broad Street

Opening: Saturday, January 6, 2007 2:00 - 4:00 pm

Exhibition continues until January 27, 2007

The vanitas tradition of classical Dutch artists is a touchstone for painter Marilyn McAvoy. Their floral still lifes were as much about death and the passage of time as celebrations of botanical beauty. For years, McAvoy has quoted from them in her paintings; recently she has been incorporating new variations on the themes of mortality and change.

Born in St Catharine's, Ontario, McAvoy studied at the University of Guelph before completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she now teaches part-time. In both those schools, McAvoy studied printmaking and drawing but not painting, leaving her free to choose her own approach to the medium. Although she did not study directly with renowned NSCAD painting instructor, Gerald Ferguson, she credits the inspiration of his work in the early 1990s, when he incorporated found wooden objects such as doors and boxes in his stencil paintings. It freed McAvoy - who (like many in the Nova Scotia art community) has worked intermittently on film production, doing scenic painting for such films as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) - to collage fragments of discarded scenic flats directly into her canvases. Collage and juxtaposition remain key compositional strategies for her, as does the placement of squares within squares. In her own words, "you can't take the printmaker out of the painter."

It was Titanic that brought McAvoy to Mexico (as stand-by painter, she created the Picasso look-alikes visible in Rose Calvert's suite). Later, McAvoy lived a year in the famed artist community of San Miguel de Allende. Moved by her mother's death in 1998, and with the help of a Canada Council grant, she studied Mexican aboveground tomb decorations, which feature centrally in the recent Viaje (Journey) series. For the backgrounds, McAvoy has combined projected details from her mother's recipes with lacey stencils of tablecloths from dollar stores that recall Mexican wall decorations. Tomb imagery also finds its way into her Vanitas series - shadows of flowers on tombs and paint splatters such as she saw in Mexico's carefully maintained cemeteries.

McAvoy's mementi mori reflect upon, not only human mortality, but that of the image itself. Working often from reproduction notecards of Old Master paintings, McAvoy has come to incorporate the surface deterioration of her reference material, as it becomes torn, creased and dog-eared. Her works explore the tension between the flatness of the canvas and the materiality of paint.

A finalist in the 2003 RBC New Canadian Painting Competition, McAvoy has exhibited in galleries across Canada and the United States. The former figure skater works on multiple canvases at once, always having one series on the go that is technically demanding, another more playful and spontaneous. "It's the figure skater in me," says McAvoy: "freestyle and compulsory figures."

Robin Metcalfe`

Director/Curator Saint Mary's University Art Gallery

Halifax, Nova Scotia