Mary Joyce Paintings return to La Loche
La Loche Friendship Centre Box 580, La Loche, Saskatchewan S0M 1G0
Mary Joyce, “Meditation on Early School Leavers” (detail), 1990, oil on gesso panel, 24" x 30” (courtesy Mann Gallery, Prince Albert, Sask.)
Marcus Miller, former Director/Curator of the Mann Gallery,has announced that paintings by Mary Joyce (The Black Point Collection), of life in La Loche, have finally made their way back to La Loche. The paintings were donated to the gallery by the artist and featured at the Mann in an exhibition curated by Miller, called Ways of Living, Ways of Painting: La Ronge and La Loche: The paintings of Myles Hector Charles and Mary Joyce.
In 1989-90, Mary Joyce (Edmonton) had the opportunity to live for one year in Black Point, a hamlet 20km south of La Loche. There she met people, made friends and painted scenes of work, play and social gatherings. Although Mary worked from observational sketches and wrote journals in preparation for final paintings, she used them as memory-jogs and starting points for the very personal impressions her subjects made on her. In the one-room log cabin/studio where she lived and worked for a year, she transformed her sketches and notes into a dream-inflected world where gravity, logic and linear reality loose their hold. Mary’s pictures evoke the fantastic, Surreal scenes of Marc Chagall (without the Cubism) and comprise a rich, and very sympathetic document of people’s social and psychic lives in La Loche, 1990.