GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY | Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer

×

Expand

Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer, “ Husbandry (still),” 2024

8 mm film transferred to digital video (courtesy of the artists)

Mary Imrie (1918 - 1988) and Jean Wallbridge (1912 - 1979) operated their architecture firm—the first run by women in Canada—at Six Acres, the home they built for their work and life together overlooking the North Saskatchewan River in west Edmonton. When Mary Imrie passed away, she bequeathed the records of their remarkable architectural practice and adventurous life, along with their home, to the province of Alberta. With a title borrowed from a telegram in the collection, GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY is Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s immersive exhibition that playfully imagines and speculates in the spaces between the correspondence, amateur 8mm film recordings, and modernist buildings that Imrie and Wallbridge left behind.

McKinney and Meyer’s collaborative practice is rooted in how queer history lives in research and archives, with past projects exploring topics such as ruins, the feminist sex wars in 1980s Vancouver, and the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives porn VHS collection. Their work treats archives as more than places to establish official historical narratives, but as sites for fantasizing, questioning, and feeling amongst objects and ephemera, and the relevance those items hold in our contemporary moment. When drawing from the archive of Imrie and Wallbridge, McKinney and Meyer’s approach to artmaking amplifies the resonance of these lovers and architects’ exceptional lives in ways that documents alone cannot.

Alongside the exhibition, the MAG is collaborating with a multitude of community partners to bring to light the legacy of Wallbridge and Imrie. At a moment when homes they designed are being torn down to build new infill properties, and with critical conversations in Edmonton about affordable housing, these tours and talks are intended as a bridge between the legacy of these architects, their modernist buildings, visions for social housing, and the importance of queer history.