EXHIBITION INFORMATION TO BE ANNOUNCED AT A LATER DATE
TENTATIVE OPENING DATE : NOVEMBER 6 2025
TENATIVE EXHIBITION RUN: NOVEMBER 6 – DECEMBER 19
Bio:
M.E. Sparks holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and BFA from NSCAD University. Recent exhibitions include “and a Rag in the Other” at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna), “We can only hint at this with words” at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art (North Vancouver), and “A Fine Line” at Trapp Projects (Vancouver). Sparks was a finalist in the 2016 and 2017 RBC Painting Competitions and is a recipient of awards and project grants, including the Nancy Petry Award and research funding from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Arts Nova Scotia. She has participated in artist residencies in Canada, Germany and Finland. Sparks currently teaches at the University of Manitoba School of Art.
Artist Statement:
My practice emerges from mixed emotions: an unrelenting infatuation with paint and canvas and a critical distrust of the history and commodification of these materials. As both inheritor and perpetuator of this history, I consider this internal conflict as a generative place to begin. I am drawn to painterly gestures that do not easily resolve themselves. It is through resistant, misbehaving and obstinate gestures that I believe there is potential for painting to reflexively engage with its own state of being and move beyond exclusionary histories, limiting discourse, and familiarized ways of looking.
In recent paintings I pull apart and rearrange borrowed forms, both art historical and autobiographical. Through this process of recombining and collapsing disparate shapes and forms with one another, I work towards the moment an image loses its representational solidity. While figurative traces may remain within the painting, I am interested in how and when a form dislocates from its origins and begins to resist singular classification. As humans, we have an innate desire to name, to know, and to categorize. As a painter, I want to explore the transformative potential of not knowing, not being able to pin down and define, and both the vulnerability and freedom that arise when we are not quite able to name what we see. Most recently, this dislocation from a representational source occurs through the cutting and perforating of un-stretched painted canvas. By manipulating the painted substrate itself, I arrive at the paradox of what painting is: image as material thing, containing depth and illusion, while simultaneously asserting a discrete objecthood. The distinction between image and object is blurred as cuts, layers, shadows and gaps introduce an alternative depth to the flat picture plane.
I am currently working on a series of un-stretched painted cutouts that explore the historically burdened form of the female figure. Most recently, I have been pulling shape, pattern, colour and form directly from the mid-twentieth century paintings of Balthus, and in doing so, explore the complex tensions of working from and within patriarchal perspectives. I question if it is possible to reclaim and reform these historical representations of the female body, which have been fetishized and familiarized throughout history. By cutting, draping and layering painted canvas, the borrowed forms are physically removed from their origins, operating as distantly familiar signifiers as well as unique objects. Through these material explorations of un-stretched canvas, I aim to call attention to the malleability, flaccidity and contradictory flatness of the painted image. As I continue to draw from historical references, I am looking for ways of “breaking through” the presumed solidity of exclusionary, and often violent, narratives within painting discourse, as well as its limiting dichotomies (ie: front vs. back; abstraction vs. figuration; image vs. object). I question if this “breaking through” can be physically enacted through the literal cutting and breaking open of the painted surface. Thinking through painting in this way introduces voids, gaps and unknowns, as the cut canvas falls in unexpected directions and the historical forms are both lost and reconstructed.