Alberta is all about big oil. Painter Eileen Murray is having a better year with it than the petroleum companies, though. Her exhibition is entitled Sprawl because of the geography it takes up on the walls of the Two Rivers Gallery.
"Go big or go home, right?" she said as she took a break from the considerable effort of hanging the gallery's latest show in the Canfor North gallery. The smallest of her works on display are six feet by eight feet, and the largest are 16.5 by 8.5 feet. So big, are they, that she had to get them to Prince George rolled up in sonotubes (usually used for pouring concrete) transported from her home in Brooks, Alta. Once here, they were unrolled and re-stretched onto wooden frames.
"My studio at home is a two-and-a-half car garage with nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings," she said. And it's a little small for her liking. Her images come to the canvas on the end of paint brushes attached to broomsticks she wields from various heights on ladders. If she tries to paint any one part of the image from close up, she loses the perspective of the overall image. In art, size absolutely matters, at least from one side of the canvas to the other.
"Part of me doing this is theatrical," said Murray.
"Females in art have, in history and even recent times, been regarded more as hobby artists, so this is partly to choose a format normally associated with men. It's a bit of a comment, too, on paintings that aren't orderly or serene - in other words, feminine. But I'm not against femininity so my colour choices are not really what a man would typically use for works of this size or style. And all that space gives me the ability to use beautifully big brush strokes. You have to be speedier on an image like this, so it makes you less detail-orientated."
The result is a set of impressionist images of stately rooms and luxurious furniture. It is, underneath it, a social commentary on the home as a major focus of consumerism.
"It is meant to evoke a sense of maybe joy, which is a bit contradictory to the literal colour choices which are individually kind of cold, but when used all together in this way it comes across more like a carnival. What I hope to do with the colour and the skewed views - you notice how the walls are crooked, and the furniture is a little bit surreal - is give a sense of how uncomfortable it would be to actually live in a room like that. It becomes an invitation into a dream or a memory. In that way, art becomes like theatre. It is all about our choices within our homes and our lives, about consumption and excess."
All these works were painted between 2011 and 2013 and the gallery is the only place where all have been assembled into one exhibition. It is a popular series in Western Canada, but in smaller configurations.
"Eileen Murray's large scale paintings address issues around ostentation and consumerism," said gallery curator George Harris. "Murray's relatively loose approach to painting results in images that present her subject matter as organic without rigid borders. Consequently the lavishly decorated interiors she paints, rich with chandeliers, rugs and other details, appear almost infected, creeping into each other to convey the impression of something virulent and out of control. Murray's paintings baroque and bodily confront the spectacle of consumer culture and material excess."
Murray's recent showings have been in some of region's most acclaimed art facilities, like the Art Gallery of Calgary, the Mann Art Gallery in Prince Albert, the Esplenade in Medicine Hat, and many more.
This is her debut showing in Prince George and she was so impressed by the gallery's architecture and position in the city's downtown that the physical qualities of the building added to her sense of excitement and honour at having now been granted a show there.
Murray is originally from the Crowsnest Pass area of the southern Rockies. She first studied art formally at Medicine Hat College, got her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge, then obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Saskatchewan.
Sprawl is on at the gallery until Oct. 9.
