On now at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Arts’ Members’ Gallery: ‘Lakeshore Meditations’ by Marguerite MacIntosh. This exhibition is on display at the Alternator until Saturday, February 22th, 2025.

This series of paintings grew from the artist’s practice of walks from her home through the Trout Creek neighbourhood in Summerland. MacIntosh’s regular walk skirts along the shore of Lake Okanagan where she makes an intentional pause to sit near water’s edge and look across the lake to the opposite shore. This pause is documented with a set of photographs of shore, lake, land and sky. The time of day and the frequency of walks varies with climate, road conditions and travel interruptions, yet they constitute an ongoing form of ritual that has been followed by the artist for over two years. The process of creating the multi-layered, formatted, abstract studio paintings serves as a contemplative exercise that incorporates the photographed lake and landscape colours. Each work includes intentional, constrained elements and spontaneous, intuitive interactions. As a group they form a visual inventory and meditation on particular moments at a particular place in the tradition of episodic series by artists such as Claude Monet and On Kawara.

The contrast of gridded/random dots and solid/expressive colours speak to the interface of life’s predictability and uncertainty. Consideration of liminal spaces such as the now between past and future, our bodies between our inner and outer worlds, and the intersection and interplay between physical and spiritual realities inform much of MacIntosh’s art practice. Her background in architecture, which deals with both the interface of the built environment within the landscape and the lived experience within built spaces, is evidenced in her use of clear geometric elements in conversation with gestural mark making and loose painterly brushstrokes.

On February 7th from 6-8pm join us in an opening reception featuring light snacks and refreshments. This event is free and open to the public.

“Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contour of things.” 

- John O’Donohue

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. Woolman was 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. Black clothing is historically related to the Quakers and other Christian religious orders and is also symbolic of death and mourning. Closet Meditations follows the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life vanitas tradition in which artists remind viewers of the imminence of death and the futility of worldly possessions.

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.  For MacIntosh, the process of inventorying these clothes with photography and documenting them through pencil drawings was an experience of embodied contemplation. In presentation, the drawings are arranged in a grid formation, a recurrent device in her work that relates to her architectural and spiritual sensibilities.  The clothes themselves are also displayed, the folded favourites versus the overflowing excess, necessitating the artist’s fast from wearing black during the exhibition.

Closet Mediations will be on view in the Members’ Gallery from October 28 to November 19.

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.