Maggie Groat is an artist for whom site-specific interventions and salvage practices function as research. By reconfiguring and recontextualizing both materials and images, Groat encourages us to consider how we identify potential within marginalized knowledge. For Suns also Seasons, Groat has created new work guided by deep time and deep future. The exhibition’s title refers to celestial bodies and decolonized systems that predate the clock and the Roman calendar as tools for understanding time. In Groat’s work, seasonality is a paradigm that can sway how objects are made and how images may be repurposed. It is another way of understanding what may be unseen, yet always present.
Groat's exhibition includes site-specific interventions that function as gestures of reclamation. Using salvaged paint from previous exhibitions, Groat has created murals informed by the windows that line the perimeter of the museum, thus proposing sunlight where it is typically unwelcome. The murals provide a backdrop for several works, including collage, sculpture made from salvaged materials, and an installation that engages selections from KWAG’s Permanent Collection—a shared resource shaped by “future use.” Attentively reflecting on all that can be found—and overlooked—within an institution’s walls, Groat creates a contemplative space where the history of other efforts informs her own.
Maggie Groat studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending the University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She has taught at the University of Guelph, the University of Toronto and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was the Audain Artist Scholar in Residence in 2014. In 2015 she was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. Recently, her work has been included in exhibitions at Mercer Union, YYZ Artists' Outlet, Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), Western Front, SFU Audain Gallery (Vancouver), Rodman Hall Art Centre (St. Catharines), and Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff).
Suns also Seasons is complemented by a parallel publication edited by Maggie Groat. ALMANAC includes contributions from artists and writers that subvert subjects typically found in traditional almanacs.
| Maggie Groat, Mother Cyle > Mother Symmetry > Mother Colour, 2017, Collage, 55.9 cm x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Erin Stump Projects. ©Maggie Groat. Photo: Jimmy Limit. |
