and a Rag in the Other presented a series of draped canvas paintings by M.E. Sparks. This work explored the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting.
Working primarily with un-stretched canvas, Sparks cuts 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 feel 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 confronted the presumed fixedness and solidity of the flat picture plane. Sparks explored 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.
Included in the exhibition was a printed booklet with a link to one of the artist's recent web-based artworks, titled in_your_painting. This piece belonged to a series of digital works exploring quotation, collage, and language. Drawing from the history of Dada poetry, in_your_painting used a hand-coded computer program to generate a series of phrases, which seemed to lead us through someone else’s space. The narrative was partially constructed through a random sampling of titles from the mid-twentieth-century paintings of Balthus, all of which depicted the young female body. Access in_your_painting by visiting Sparks’ website.
and a Rag in the Other was on view in the Main Gallery from October 28 to December 10, 2022.
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. Recent exhibitions include We can only hint at this with words at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art (North Vancouver, 2022) and a A Fine Line at Trapp Projects (Vancouver, 2021). She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and BFA from NSCAD University. Sparks gratefully acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.
