Eccentric. Distinctive. Restless. Fearless. Intense.
These words came to mind as I explored a new and edifying book, The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs, a collaboration with Victoria curator Helen Marzolf.
Meigs – the holder of a 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and the 2015 recipient of the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize – is no one-trick pony. Even the term visual artist belies the richness of her oeuvre. She’s described in the book’s notes as “part philosopher, part filmmaker, performer, writer, tinkerer, prankster, conjurer, naturalist, upholsterer and teacher.” Quite a skill set.
Marzolf refers to American-born Meigs, a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria who is now based in Hamilton, Ont., as “an artist of athletic creativity,” saying she “drills into the problems of life and art with ferocious persistence.” Her work includes painting, sound, sculpture, installation, narrative and the other enactments described above.
How to compress that scope – created over four decades – without over-simplifying it?
Sandra Meigs, “Blue. 1000 Mountain Rest. (Breath),” 2013
acrylic on canvas, 6′ x 18′ (photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)
Selected works are organized into four make-sense chapters: The Gothic, Nature Through Narrative, The Slapstick and Other Mysteries, and Reckoning/Awakening. As Marzolf notes, “Although the book scans Sandra’s entire career, it is not a catalogue raisonné – it samples 17 projects from a productive and ever-galvanizing practice.”
Meigs’ work often reaches into the absurd and surreal, where Marzolf describes an underpinning of the personal, the meditative and the mysterious. It is physical with a surface informed by the metaphysical, perhaps the spiritual.
Pages from “The Way Between Things” by Sandra Meigs and Helen Marzolf.
The book, designed by Victoria’s Clink Hutzulak, is sumptuous with colour and includes 70 images. There’s also a book-within-the-book, a bound-in insert that presents four memoir narratives from Meigs’ younger days – at ages 5, 8, 11 and 19 – printed in a vibrating retro colour palette of acidic yellow and persimmon.
Marzolf’s text is a deep contemplation that digs beneath the surface to connect the artist’s thinking, aesthetics and processes. Detail is plentiful. Marzolf includes quotations and citations from Meigs, and from writers who have examined her work, including Nancy Tousley, Sarah Milroy and the late John Bentley-Mays.
Sandra Meigs, “The Glass Ticker,” 2017
wood, enamel, lights, aluminum, glass and automata, installation view (courtesy of Susan Hobbs Gallery; photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)
In a featured quotation, Meigs addresses what she strives for in her artwork. “Do we look at the world? Or do we look INTO the world? Do we know the world inwardly, as if the membrane of our body is permeable to that which is outside of it? Do you doubt what you see? Do you ever fall completely into and beyond what a painting brings to your perception? One should hope for that moment that knows beyond words.”
Meigs creates not simply images, but experiences – a frame alone cannot hold her wide-ranging consciousness and epic reach. An example is Room for Mystics, a 2017 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario that comprised 30 paintings, 13 wall banners, 17 speaker boxes and eight amplifiers. A sound component was composed by frequent collaborator Christopher Butterfield, a music professor at the University of Victoria. And once a day, a trio of trumpeters played while pacing beneath the gigantic mobile that presided over the show.
The Vox Aeris Trio (Amelia Grace Shiels, Emma Castellino and Aaron Good
from left to right) performed “Room for Mystics” once a day from 11:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (photo by Sandra Meigs)
In contrast, the magnitude of the The Little Lost Operas, is less expansive but brings us up to date through its intersection with the pandemic. It employs painting, puppets, collaged texts, electric fans and fabric scraps, and incorporates visual references to theatre and opera. Meigs’ deployment is layered. One piece, The Ghost, uses acrylic, wood, clothing, polymer clay, metal and paper. Within the frame, it features a painting of a stage set with a costumed female figure, perhaps from a French farce, and repurposed fabric as stage curtains. Sitting on the surface, and seeming over-sized, is a cloth-draped three-dimensional “ghost dog.” The piece captures the range of Meigs’ fecund imagination – concept, whimsy, disjunction, mixed media, assemblage, joke, provocation and mystery. The Little Lost Operas opened at the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic lockdown. So, Meigs brought her characters outside, installing life-size vinyl images on the gallery's exterior facade.
Sandra Meigs poses with “The Little Lost Operas Characters,” 2020
vinyl on exterior door of the Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, 8′ x 9′ (courtesy the artist)
The 167-page book’s expositional text concludes with Epilogue, which shows an image from Meigs’ pandemic project – she painted over or hand-tinted photographs of the interiors of friends’ homes. For Meigs, it was a way to visit when that couldn’t be done in person.
The Way Between Things leads readers, like guests, into the artist’s space, an experiential ecosystem filled with emotion and wonder, and articulates and synthesizes Meigs’ astonishing imagination. ■
The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs by Sandra Meigs and Helen Marzolf. ECW Press, Toronto, 2021.
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