Exhibition

2014 Border Cultures Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor, curated by Srimoyee Mitra
The Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon, 1954 – 2014 [link]

Marian McMahon was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1954. She was a filmmaker, curator and scholar, whose contribution to Canadian critical film and video practice had a substantial impact on contemporary art discourse in Canada creating a dialogue for women’s experiences, interlacing personal and shared subjectivities to examine the dominant framework of the Canadian nationhood and history. Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon aims to pay homage to the work of an artist who – during her short-lived career due to her early death in 1996 – bridged multiple boundaries through her life working between caregiving (she worked as a registered nurse from 1974 to 1984) and making art, academia and film, photography and text. She received her Phd posthumously, from the University of Toronto (OISE – Ontario Institute of Studies in Education) in 2000.

This installation has been pieced together by award-winning filmmaker Philip Hoffman from McMahon’s archives not only as a tribute to her contribution to contemporary discourse in film and visual art but also as a meditation on personal and collective memories, the social production and distribution of images that govern home movies and McMahon’s commitment to the evolution of autobiography, and the complexity of the `subject’ within the written word. Hoffman presents her widely screened film Nursing History and two versions of her unfinished work Racing Home, while both are auto-didactic, self-reflexive and draw connections and disconnections between personal experience, learned behavior versus public ceremonies and official narratives, she invited the viewer to contemplate “how memory works and how history is made.” It is in this spirit that Hoffman develops a public dialogue with her archive, pairing formal portraits of the McMahon family from her childhood, with intimate and humorous collages from her later years, photographs of their travels together as life partners with his own collage works with film stills, reproductions of photographs and screening his award-winning experimental-documentary film, What These Ashes Wanted (2001) made after her sudden death.

Altogether this project conveys the urgency of dealing with the traumas of loss whether it is of a loved one, nationhood or war. As the daughter of a veteran, growing up in a border town at the height of segregation, organizing and uprisings in Detroit and Windsor, where gendered and racial lines crossed women’s bodies in violent ways, McMahon’s work remains compelling as it invites viewers to re-think assumptions of history, while providing an insight into the potential of an artist’s practice to reimagine the margins as a space of inclusion, a point of departure, and the continuation of a journey and inspiring Hoffman to make her unfinished work Racing Home available as a work in-progress (1996) and as an open-source non-linear interactive Korsakow film (2014).

Srimoyee Mitra, Curator Art Gallery of Windsor