Rules of Mantis

Connecting everyday experience with mythical imagination, strangeness and beauty, Madeleine Mayo’s artwork reveals metaphorical abstractions of reciprocal states such as childhood and maturity, secular and spiritual, fantasy and reality. Her series of paintings playfully explore the power of abstraction to provide meaningful ways to approach ambiguity and the unknown. The inherent idealism of abstraction can express, as the artist states, “a critical feminist desire to be lifted up, to move forward, to envision and want more of something felt or imagined”.

Madeleine Mayo is an interdisciplinary artist who works with painting, sculpture and installation. Her works ride the edge between abstraction and figuration expressing sensuality and an often mythical imagination. Using humour and openness, she strives to challenge moralistic biases in a playful way by imbuing a vision of uplifting imagination with contradiction and imperfection. Mayo holds a BFA in Painting from OCADU (The Ontario College of Art and Design University) and an MFA from Concordia University. She currently lives and works in Montréal, Québec.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for this exhibition.

The McClure Gallery thanks the Conseil des arts de Montréal for its financial support.