NOT QUITE SURE ABOUT THE GLITTER THOUGH
Monica McGarry
The Cube
September 17 to October 29, 2016
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Monica McGarry’s work uses pop culture, kitsch and humour to challenge how people perceive and engage with images in the world around them. Her choice of material recalls a childhood fascination with glossy and shiny objects and materials. As we mature into adulthood, a fascination with eye-catching material remains, though perhaps our desire to interact with them lessens. The artist delves into how this perception changes as we get older and how we can be drawn back into an investigation of our surroundings, beyond appearances. Glitter, often a staple of children’s art projects, is used as the central medium in McGarry’s large scale painting to invite viewers to take in the shimmering surface more closely, while the text and interrogative titles of both the work and the exhibition wrestle with the seduction of this material, highlighting this uneasy relationship between criticality and the experience of wonder as we age.
McGarry's sculptural installation, Fluttering Iridescent Ribbon, references American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s approach to representation in works such as his 1965 One and Three Chairs. Kosuth presented three incarnations of a chair including an actual chair, a photograph of a chair and a text panel with a description of a chair. McGarry treats the fluttering iridescent ribbon similarly, provoking the viewer to consider how meaning is constructed. McGarry’s installation playfully addresses notions of beauty and seduction and the underlying question: What is art? Together, the works in the exhibition reflect on how we assign meaning to objects and how we relate to images in the context of art making and viewing at a time when we are constantly bombarded by visual information.
Monica McGarry
Fluttering Iridescent Ribbon, 2016
mixed media, video projection
Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Cory Hope, Kamloops Art Gallery
