NYAB Event - Margaux Williamson “I Could See Everything”

Margaux Williamson “I Could See Everything”

Mulherin + Pollard

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MULHERIN + POLLARD presents a new series of paintings by Margaux Williamson. I Could See Everything marks an end to Williamson’s six-year hiatus from exhibiting in galleries. During this time, Williamson made a critically acclaimed feature movie Teenager Hamlet (2010), collaborated with friends, wrote a popular movie review blog, and undertook a period of exploration into her studio practice – why paint?

“I started this series a few years ago, when I was in the Yukon working on a movie project. It was early winter so the dark nights kept getting longer and the shrinking days appeared even brighter. Though I wasn’t painting at the time, there was something about this dominating environment that made me think of painting. It was the great, ugly realism of the day that shows plainly the edges of things and where they connect, contrasted with the confusion, potential, and deceptive depth of the night where a necessary imagination fills in the blindness with mistakes, insights and surprises. I suddenly had a desire to tie these things together, to tie flatness to deceptive depth, to tie imagination to the ground, to see what is real or what could be real, to learn what the rules of that relationship would be, to see what that would look like.”

As always—but particularly now—Williamson’s fascination with transcending the boundary between the authentic and the imaginary is primary. I Could See Everything travels to New York from a made-up gallery in the far north. The show is a remount of an exhibition that first took place in a non-existent venue called The Road at the Top of the World Museum. Ann Marie Peña, producer, curator and co-director of Frith Street Gallery in London, UK curates the exhibit.

In this new body of work, accompanied by a publication of the same title published by Coach House Press, Williamson collapses the distinction between art show, museum catalogue, and documentation of something astonishing that never was. I Could See Everything is a group of paintings that carry fragmentary, flickering meaning. In this way, these works are oddly, wondrously at home in the real world.

The publication features images of paintings in the show as well a selection of process and studio works. There are essays by Ann Marie Peña as well as Chris Kraus, Leanne Shapton, David Balzer, and Mark Greif.

Margaux Williamson is a painter, filmmaker and social artist. She is the creator of the conceptual movie review blog Movie is My Favourite Word and co-author of the website of cultural criticism Back to the World. Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto presented Williamson’s first solo show in 2001.