Cathrine MacTavish

8 March 1983 - 26 March 1983
Opening Reception 8 March 1983 8pm

West Gallery:

Art in the Obsessional Style

Night Vision: Stars in her Eyes
“The Pure Gold Baby that Melts to a Shriek”

Toronto artist Catherine MacTavish will be presenting paintings at Mercer Union from March 8th – March 26th. The exhibition will also include photographs “My Pictures” by Sue Schnee and Nial Burnett.

“Work in progress, reflective of the experience of continuance in a stream of consciousness made up of states of incompletion, uncertainty, and change.

The issue is desire: to see a landscape finished, subject and object co-existed in a unified field, to perfect the body, a body of work and the issue is control to reconcile chance, accident, divination with determination and reason. Is the unfinished desirable, or is the desire it inspires or completion? Just who possesses “My Pictures” – the self imaged for the photographer? If “My Pictures” are desirable, am I? If so, is it not their possession desirable, and are they not valuable? We fight over such valuables, damaged the goods. Is the flawed still desirable?
The drive is toward perfection. Can perfection be recognized in the unresolved state? Contemporary medicine asserts that perfectionism is the source of much depression and obsessive compulsive illness. Theology asserts that “the prompting towards the ideal with the human heart” is “Christ – the very image of God.” A puritanical, materialist society reinforce and supports obsessional behaviour when its ritual is labour to produce a marketable commodity – the finished work of art, the fashion photograph.”

– Catherine MacTavish.