STATEMENT OF WORK

M.E. Sparks works primarily with paint and canvas to investigate ambiguities of representation, historical narrative and familiarized ways of looking. Through a practice of pulling apart and recombining borrowed forms, both art historical and autobiographical, she is interested in the moment an image loses its representational solidity. While figurative traces often remain within her paintings, Sparks explores how and when a form dislocates from its origins and resists singular classification. Her painitngs often play with the experience of not knowing, of not being able to pin down and define, and of the vulnerability and transformative potential that arise when we are unable to name what we see. 
 

In recent work, Sparks confronts the historically burdened form of the female figure. By culling shape, colour and pattern from mid-twentieth century depictions of femininity and youth, she digs into the complex tension of working from and within patriarchal perspectives. The work addresses ideas of uncertainty and unsettled spaces of representation, as well as ownership and transformation of historical narrative. Most recently, Sparks has been exploring the possibilities of cut and un-stretched canvas in an effort to reimagine the flatness and rigidity of the painted image as malleable, soft, and unfixed. Through a process of cutting, draping and layering pieces of once-whole paintings, historical forms are physically removed from their origins, operating as distantly familiar signifiers as well as new, autonomous objects.