Excerpt from
Margaux Williamson

Few artworks so fittingly reflect the premise of Fresh Air: New Acquisitions in Context, currently on view at the McMichael, than Margaux Williamson’s Meeting Place, 2021. Williamson’s canvas masterfully renders a familiar scene as beloved and yet still somehow uncanny, a dynamic that mirrors how the painting both recognizes and innovates on the nearby Ontario woodland scenes such as Tom Thomson’s Beech Grove, 1916, or Lawren Harris’s Wood Interior, Algoma, c. 1919. Williamson’s title refers to the porch in the foreground, a site for gathering, as well as to the five trees that stand in for the artist’s most cherished persons who were held in her recollections during the separation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Picking up on the themes of communion and collectivity, Williamson’s painting highlights the interconnectedness of nature and our roles in it as inhabitants and inheritors. 

The exhibition catalogue Margaux Williamson was published on the occasion of her mid-career survey, Interiors, presented in 2021–22 at the McMichael. To highlight Meeting Place along with Williamson’s other significant contributions to contemporary art, we are including an excerpt from the catalogue by the guest curator, Jessica Bradley:  

Williamson has said that painting can be a place to consider what is real and what has value. Such consideration leads her to make images unconstrained by the dictates of a preconceived composition and instead to build progressively with details that stay in the mind. In her studio, an unobtrusive garage behind her house on a downtown Toronto side street, Williamson yields to the slow process demanded by large oil paintings, constructing images that, like thoughts, unfold organically. The interiors that have become a dominant theme in her recent work are both literal spaces, somewhere comfortably familiar, and places of imaginative interiority where her inanimate subjects are brought under the spell of her anarchic treatment of space. 

Williamson presents these banal realities as worthy of exploration and liberated from conventional hierarchies. An assortment of food and objects left overnight on the kitchen table, the light catching the rim of a glass, a box of discarded papers in the corner, or the glow of a laptop screen—all are given value and can seem to exist autonomously, their compelling presences honoured. The expanses of undifferentiated space she often leaves around them invite looking more closely. There is a frankness to her work that enlivens her canvases as fields of inquiry untethered from foreseeable resolution. Rather, a spaciousness in her images gives us licence to rove around details that become anchors in a field of possibilities. 

An uncanny temporal element inhabits these spaces as objects are seen in fading light or emerging from darkness in dense strokes of paint that describe the intangibility of a moment. Williamson makes her paintings with a fluency that presents multiple and simultaneous relationships, as in collage. For her the brush stroke, the act of putting paint on canvas, anticipates both figuration and abstraction: the depiction of real objects situated in the fluid pictorial space and time unique to her work.