Sandra Meigs
The Room of 1,000 Paintings: Series #5 in the Project Room
Painting Installation

Toronto Artist
Brochure: Project Room Series (1992-1993)

MEDIA RELEASE

Under the title Series, Mercer Union is presenting a number of exhibitions in the Project Room which investigate the recent history of local art.

Series 5 is a remounting of Sandra Meigs' Room of 1000 Paintings first exhibited in 1986. The show opens on May 27 at 8pm and continues through June 24, 1993.

As a display of memory, negotiating the clutter of personal history and the accretions of popular culture, Sandra Meigs' The Room of 1,000 Paintings investigates the complex operations of contemporary experience. The installation examines issues central to local critical discourse in the 1980s --the nature and function of representation as concomitant to the construction of identity. However, rather than positioning representation as an exterior phenomenon, Meigs blurs distinctions between an image and the experience of it. In this work she presents a barrage of imagery both mundane and fantastic and yet creates an intimate rather than impenetrable effect.

In a room filled with 69 small paintings, images are presented which seem somehow familiar, perhaps remembered as decorating childhood bedrooms or suburban basements - portraits of pets, ballerinas and Saturday morning cartoon heroes. These are displayed along with everyday scenes like a woman washing her hair, and bizarre dream-like images. A uniformity of presentation gives the appearance that these images are all culled from, and skewed by, a single idiosyncratic memory coloured by unpredictable pleasures and fears. Meigs articulates the domestic sentimental attachments and kitsch appeal of these images as a means of reenacting the early cultural experiences which shape identities, and in order to trace the shifting contours of this formation.

Mercer Union has produced a publication documenting each of the Series exhibitions.