Indoors off-kilter

How do we imagine the spaces in which we live? How do we experience domesticity, especially when so much of our time has been spent indoors as of late? For Margaux Williamson – Toronto-based painter, writer and filmmaker, acclaimed in Canada and abroad – interior spaces are sites for creative exploration and anarchic experimentation. Guest-curated by Jessica Bradley, Interiors is Williamson’s recently unveiled solo exhibition, on view at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection until May 8, 2022. Spanning the last 15 years of the artist’s career, it includes more than 40 oil-on-canvas paintings ranging in scale, the majority of which were painted during the last five years.

Interiors, as revealed through Williamson’s shifting perspectives, refers not only to the physical spaces we inhabit, but the mental spaces we retreat to as well. Williamson’s visual language paints “everydayness” askew, toying with foreshortening and spatial depth to draw viewers in from different vantage points. Three-dimensional settings, whether a living room, bedroom or kitchen table, take on a flattened, dreamlike quality, intentionally left unresolved and unsteady through Williamson’s interpretation.

The absence of text in Williamson’s painted scenes is intentional too – the text on a newspaper or lettering on a bottle label replaced with illegible scribbles. A writer as well as a painter, Williamson removes words to encourage viewers to immerse themselves in their own meanings – as mentioned by the artist in an interview about these new works: 

"I need words, especially other people’s words, but a lot of the time words can seem really oppressive to me, even overused or overvalued: words on T-shirts, conversations, speeches, so much talking. It makes sense that I’m a painter. And it seems like a lot of people still don’t quite understand how valuable it is—the kind of intelligence, presence, and attention one can have without words."