NOT QUITE SURE ABOUT THE GLITTER THOUGH

Monica McGarry

The Cube
September 17 to October 29, 2016

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

Monica McGarry’s work uses pop culture, kitsch and humour to challenge how people perceive and engage with images in the world around them. Her choice of material recalls a childhood fascination with glossy and shiny objects and materials. As we mature into adulthood, a fascination with eye-catching material remains, though perhaps our desire to interact with them lessens. The artist delves into how this perception changes as we get older and how we can be drawn back into an investigation of our surroundings, beyond appearances. Glitter, often a staple of children’s art projects, is used as the central medium in McGarry’s large scale painting to invite viewers to take in the shimmering surface more closely, while the text and interrogative titles of both the work and the exhibition wrestle with the seduction of this material, highlighting this uneasy relationship between criticality and the experience of wonder as we age.