SEEKING GEORGIA | MARY KAVANAGH
01.21.2006 | 03.05.2006
Through an investigation of the multiple industries that surround painter and feminist icon Georgia O’Keeffe, Mary Kavanagh examines the production of cultural history, the cult of personality, and the detrimental effects of tourism on arts scholarship. Her project, Seeking Georgia, considers the dual role that O’Keeffe occupies—in some quarters revered and celebrated, while in others dismissed as an overwrought cliché.
In the summer of 2005, Kavanagh traveled to the regions of Northern New Mexico where Georgia O’Keeffe produced some of her signature works. Intent upon probing the interstices between fable and fact, Kavanagh tracked the movements of O’Keeffe through the desert where the artist lived and worked between 1929 and her death in 1986. Assisted by reproductions of signature works, and accompanied by scholars and locals, Kavanagh identified specific sites painted by O’Keeffe around Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, Taos, Alcalde and Santa Fe.
O’Keeffe’s biography, legendary status, and the role of myth in a critical analysis of her work are investigated in Seeking Georgia, an installation that blurs the boundaries between academic constructs of history and museum practices which confer authentication through presentation. Records of Kavanagh’s visits to the various regions—handfuls of earth gathered at each site, maps, writings and video-recorded conversations between Kavanagh and collaborators—reveal the artist’s own system of understanding and research, where the performative, the tangible and the material enter into the act of rewriting. Kavanagh comments:
I’ve long been interested in what I refer to as my family of authors: genealogies of intellectual, emotional and aesthetic influence. The working process I have engaged with for this project lays bare the historical and disciplinary constructions used to build mythology and power structures.
Mary Kavanagh’s work encompasses a broad range of media including audio, video, and performance, often in combination with sculptural elements either found or fabricated. She produces her work by researching and interpreting specific histories through sustained engagement with the material and cultural residue that accumulates with the passage of time. Kavanagh maintains her studio practice in Lethbridge where she teaches in the art department at the University. She holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in Art History from the University of Western Ontario. Her work has been exhibited across Canada, most recently at La Centràle in Montreal and A Space Gallery in Toronto. Seeking Georgia was conceived during an artist’s residency sponsored by the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.
Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Curator: Joan Stebbins). Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge.
