Culture of Resistance

Mary Joyce’s paintings celebrate the joy of a common humanity.

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Red is the colour of rage, blood and passion. In Mary Joyce’s show, Culture of Resistance/Culture de résistance, at La Galerie Cité in Edmonton until Oct. 22, it’s also a colour symbolizing joy.

When I first stepped into the gallery – in the lobby of La Cité Francophone, a cultural centre for the city’s French-speaking residents – I looked at the vibrant cadmium red paintings, depicting protesters revolting against the status quo, and interpreted the red as angry, raw and full of revolutionary feeling.

I missed the joy.

Walking through the gallery a second time with Joyce, as she paused at each painting to point out a small hidden detail, or a friend’s face in a sea of dots, I realized the moments she paints – although they emerge from anger at the state of the world – vibrate with movement, expectancy and hope.

“Everywhere you look people are in resistance,” says Joyce. Her work reflects this global reality, with paintings of recent protests in places like Montreal, Edmonton, Palestine, Brazil and France.

“I want it to appeal to … real humanity, and to increase people’s humanity.”

Raised in Sherbrooke, Que., Joyce has lived in Edmonton for many years. She was inspired to begin this series after the 2012 student protests in Montreal, when people came out in the thousands to protest tuition hikes. They pinned red squares to their coats to symbolize their fight.

In paintings like Our Safety/Notre sûreté ... Sherbrooke, the red square is enlarged into a flat, abstract form on the canvas, surrounded by a crowd of figures. Huge red squares of fabric really were carried through the streets during the protests in Quebec.

The centrepiece of the show is a huge red cloth suspended as a canopy above the atrium, its four corners stretching to the edges of the second-floor balcony. Viewers can walk under the gigantic folds of red fabric or climb the stairs and look at it from above. It is a tangible – and giant – symbol of resistance, one that speaks to the political moment at each place it’s exhibited.

Although red squares recur in many of Joyce’s paintings, others depict more recent events. Indian Farmers Flowers Shower/La pluie des fleurs des fermiers et fermières de l’Inde shows ongoing protests against Indian legislation that would remove government protections from agriculture, raising fears that corporations will squeeze small farmers out of the market. The painted farmers raise their arms as dots of pink, yellow and red vibrate around them. Look at the sky and you can see white circles Joyce made by pushing paint through the holes in a pizza pan.

Joyce rarely uses brushes in her work. If you look closely at paintings like Democracy!/Démocratie!, you can see the way the paint has been scraped and scratched with implements made from plastic yogurt containers or cut-up milk cartons. Her tools and colours create a sense of vibration and movement, especially in crowd scenes.

Joyce says it’s important these images are not viewed as propaganda.

“These paintings deal with the things that really matter to people,” she says. “The right to speak, to speak out – I’m using that right as I paint them, and also I’m valorizing or insisting on that right.”

“To me, that’s the role of an artist. The role of an artist is … to understand freedom.” ■  

Mary Joyce: Culture of Resistance/Culture de résistance at La Galerie Cité in Edmonton from July 26 to Oct. 22, 2021. 

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Galerie Cité

8627 91 Street (rue Marie Anne Gaboury, Edmonton, Alberta T6C 3N1

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