The Basement Panoramas
Program, P.2273
- Identifier
- P.2273
- Category
- Visual Arts
- Date
- November 1 – December 13, 2013
- Description
-
Sandra Meigs Explores the Mechanics of Grief. Victoria artist Sandra Meigs explores expressive terrain in her new project, The Basement Panoramas, connecting drawing, painting, sound, robotics, and perception into an experiential installation. Taking as a point of departure the invisible underthings of architecture—basements and crawl spaces—Meigs resuscitates forgotten, and often neglected, storage spaces and charges them with potent psycho-social intensity.
Please join Sandra Meigs on Saturday, December 14, 2013, at 3:00 p.m., at Open Space for an informal artist’s talk and tour of The Basement Panoramas. The exhibi- tion continues until Saturday, December 14, 2013.
For centuries, the human body has been a standard metaphor for architecture, a device that Meigs pushes into the untravelled psychological spaces of memory and loss, experience and interiority. The Basement Panoramas are brilliantly hued large- scale paintings that overwhelm the spectator’s field of vision. In each, Meigs charts a passage, annotated by handwritten notes, loosening the confines of subject matter, opening other spaces and unexpected interplay. Grief propelled Meigs’s new series: her paintings refract emotional intensity.Meigs’s canvases achieve an uncanny human presence that seems to breathe or shift as the viewers observe. In fact, one must walk back and forth to fully apprehend the works. To amplify this destabilizing quality, Meigs constructed The Bones in the Golden Robes, a series of roving ghostly robotic figures that cohabit the space. Meigs worked with Victoria composer Christopher Butterfield to develop the sound components of the ghost robots. She also enlisted the help of artist Mowry Baden tocreate special panoramic headgear as an analogue experience in the gallery space.