Marilyn McAvoy: Silent Room

In her recent works, Halifax artist Marilyn McAvoy employs recycled fragments of flats from film sets as supports for sensuous still life and flower paintings. Combining these paintings, in varying scales and degrees of finish, with other salvaged elements (faux marbled panels, wallpaper, brown crackled wainscotting) McAvoy creates assemblages that, while pleasing in their formal design, raise teasing questions about perception and visual representation. The "silent room" of the title refers to the scenic flats: once parts of rooms constructed for cinematic action -- illusory places where drama happened and where "fabrication", in many senses, took place -- they now serve to support a different kind of illusion, in the quiet space of the gallery. Curated by Susan Gibson Garvey, the exhibition has received funding from the Nova Scotia Department of Education and Culture.