Star Rider

Galerie Deux Poissons is delighted to begin our season’s exhibition program with an exciting offering – “Star Rider”, a duo show featuring two highly talented emerging artists, Madeleine Mayo and Rebecca Munce. Both are recent Master’s of Fine Arts students from Concordia University’s excellent and respected program, and both have already shown their work in a number of prestigious contexts and locations. Here in juxtaposed combination in “Star Rider” – an exhibition that examines as well as emphasizes the self-aware, ironic, and tongue-in-cheek elements in their work – they have nevertheless broadcasted the unaffected power of their respective artistic worlds, as they continue to develop their fascinating projects.

Madeleine Mayo’s wryly powerful, emotionally multi-faceted works in both two and three dimensions resist easy stylistic categorization, drawing from a deep well of formal influences, and transforming them into a clear, individualized expressive voice in painting, sculpture and installation. Forms like natural extrusions of semi-biomorphic origin, semiotic images of whimsical beauty, and a palette of gleefully uninhibited chromatic directness combine to delight the eye of the viewer while providing a certain winking puzzle for the mind to figure through and sort out. Her command of the exhibition space adds a strong temporal dimension to the experience of reading her work, as we are invited and coaxed to move around and about it in order to find out what’s going on inside.

Rebecca Munce’s slowly unfolding, darkly imaginative world is both quiet and dreamlike, as well as flushed with energy and action. Her fascinating, colourful drawings and sculptures depict an odd reality of a “through-the-looking-glass” kind, recalling and referencing everything from board games and playing cards, comic books and cartoons, outsider art, surrealism and mythology. Symbolism in the historical sense intermingles with a much more personal and nuanced kind of symbolic representation, to create a humorously menacing, aggressively harmless kind of paradoxical demimonde, populated by a cast and crew of eerily familiar, freshly surprising characters.