Mavourneen Trainor at Definitely Superior

Mavourneen Trainor’s show of recent work at Definitely Superior Galleries this winter, was a recapitulation of her personal history as an artist and as a woman in America. One should properly say “Americas”, with the stress on the plural and the plurality of the word. Trainor was raised by an Irish father and a Mexican mother and spent her school years in various locations in South, Central and North America. As an adult she found herself studying art in Canada and ultimately she adopted Canadian citizenship.
Her journeying across boundaries of geography, culture, and memory is the topic of her most recent work. She has adopted a method of working which allows for the most stylistic freedom while still binding the new to the old. Her collages, using shards of photos, drawings, and transparencies, revives her memories of her past lives and recomposes them into an overarching summary. In the work we note the thematic motifs which repeat from piece to piece and we are lead to unearth the chronology of the layered images. The work begins to take on the archeological aspect of an ruined jungle site, full of hints and incomplete clues, but mostly lush and fertile, full of shadow and colour.
One theme which surfaces repeatedly is the Artist’s Model, a nude female most often, whose identity is sometimes confused or conflated with the artist herself, and serves as a vessel for the artist’s conflicting experiences of feminine culture in various Americas of her imagination. The female form is presented as object of study, as a template for artistic exploration, and as an anxiously ambiguous mirror. Another recurring image is the marionette, a keepsake of her childhood and a reminder of a more festive culture but also a powerful symbol of her suspended condition between past and future. We also find in the work references to Michaelangelo’s David, serving a similarly multifarious purpose as artist’s model and cultural symbol, not to mention sex symbol, a simple travelogue icon, and possibly a sly reference to married life. Meanwhile, swirling in, on, and under the cuttings are painted the colours of Matisse by way of Mexican street markets, a nostalgic reference to a receding past, and a healthful tonic to alleviate the relentlessly colourless winters of her new home in Thunder Bay.
The overwhelming sensation one has in recalling this work is one of density and restless activity. The eye is kept in motion and flicks from fragment to fragment, adding and building, connecting and remembering. Even those viewers who do not relate the work to the artist’s personal history will have the sensation of speed-reading a biography, one that is slightly blurred by hasty energy, slightly indefinite in the way memory often is, gritty and slippery, faceted like a crystal , as real and unreal as the dream you had just before you awoke.
Finally the sheer physical presence of the pieces, their torn and layered construction, their festive yet often melancholy colour, the reiteration of imagery in various states of repair, gives the work a fugitive aspect wholly in keeping with its memorialising task, and has the slight air of sadness that we often have after having summed up our accomplishments and our regrets, resolving to move on.

Mark Nisenholt

4/5/95