Curator’s Introductions to Solo Exhibitions- Mary E. Rawlyk, 1985

Joan Murray  Director, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery Oshawa ON

Close Up on the Cover-up: Mary Rawlyk

For a Canadian woman artist in 1985, the decade, while only half finished, shows signs of being another grey one. Since 1971 there has not been a major retrospective of a woman’s work at the National Gallery of Canada (that year they showed Joyce Wieland}. Since 1975 there has been no group show of Contempory  women artists there. Womens’ shows are safe enough in the historic sphere, in both the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario shows of old or dead women got their due. But the living have to be combined with men.

Gender related shows scare people, especially curators. As partly concerned with conserving, curators are basically conservative. The latest mode, Neo- Expressionism is, as some women have pointed out, male, penis as- paintbrush work. Women are getting more of their due but often they are treated as boring. It’s sexism by another name. This is where the work of Mary Rawlyk provides welcome relief.

Rawlyk is everything Neo-Expressionism is not. She’s one with the women artists of the 1970s who appropriated formerly disreputable (for serious art)media-fabrics and prints- to make consciously vanguard art. She works with recognizable, careful imagery in delicate pastel shades, and she’s avowedly a feminist. She works alone, without a group.

Her images concern the universal, North American cover-up for domestic women: the apron. “the idea of attaching hands to the end of the apron ties appealed to me because that gave the apron a human dimension,” says Rawlyk. Her Aprons are like people, funny, pathetic and full of life They reveal what is hidden in the domestic situation-exhaustion, anger, isolation, futility, irony. When we see them we cannot help but react convivially. They call for the diary and confessional. Rawlyk is one of the important spokespersons for womanhood today. In her work we find hope for women artists of the future.