“Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contour of things.” 

- John O’Donohue

Closet Meditations emerged as a project following Marguerite MacIntosh’s participation in the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art’s online exhibition The Assembly: Sustainability earlier this year and her reading of The Journal of John Woolman. Woolman was an eighteenth-century Quaker whose writings challenged issues of his day that continue to plague contemporary life, often speaking of how the lure of luxury manifested in possessions, clothing, and travel can so easily override sound judgment. Black clothing is historically related to the Quakers and other Christian religious orders and is also symbolic of death and mourning. Closet Meditations follows the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life vanitas tradition in which artists remind viewers of the imminence of death and the futility of worldly possessions.

In this installation, MacIntosh examines the contents of her own closet and its preponderance of black clothing.  She considers how she uses the clothes she buys and wears to inform her identity in myriad ways, usually distracted and detached from the implications of this consumption in terms of environmental destruction and worker exploitation.  For MacIntosh, the process of inventorying these clothes with photography and documenting them through pencil drawings was an experience of embodied contemplation. In presentation, the drawings are arranged in a grid formation, a recurrent device in her work that relates to her architectural and spiritual sensibilities.  The clothes themselves are also displayed, the folded favourites versus the overflowing excess, necessitating the artist’s fast from wearing black during the exhibition.

Closet Mediations will be on view in the Members’ Gallery from October 28 to November 19.

Marguerite MacIntosh is an artist and retired architect in addition to being a wife, mother, and grandmother.  Her works in acrylic, pencil and mixed media contemplate her own experiences of time and place and point to an awareness of the present moment and the liminal spaces in which we find ourselves.  She lives with her husband and their dog Beau in Summerland, British Columbia.

Closet Meditations in the Members’ Gallery.