MacIntosh
Closet Meditations
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
Kelowna, BC
“Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contour of things.”
John O’Donohue
Closet Meditations emerged as a project following the artist’s participation in the Alternator Centre’s online exhibition Sustainability earlier this year and her reading of The Journal of John Woolman. Woolman was an eighteenth-century Quaker whose writings challenged issues of his day that continue to plague contemporary life, often speaking of how the lure of luxury manifested in possessions, clothing, and travel can so easily override sound judgement. Black clothing is historically related to the Quakers and other Christian religious orders and is also symbolic of death and mourning. Closet Meditations follows the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life vanitas tradition in which artists remind viewers of the immanence of death and the futility of worldly possessions.
In this installation Marguerite MacIntosh examines the contents of her own closet and its preponderance of black clothing. She considers how she uses the clothes she buys and wears to inform her identity in myriad ways, usually distracted and detached from the implications of this consumption in terms of environmental destruction and worker exploitation. For MacIntosh, the process of inventorying these clothes with photography and documenting them through pencil drawings was an experience of embodied contemplation. In presentation, the drawings are arranged in a grid formation, a recurrent device in her work that relates to her architectural and spiritual sensibilities. The clothes themselves are also displayed, the folded favourites versus the overflowing excess, necessitating the artist’s fast from wearing black during the exhibition.















