Immersive Intimacies: Margaux Williamson

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Margaux Williamson, “Window Front,” 2025 (courtesy of the artist)

What if a character in a novel you’ve read made art in real life and you went to see it? What if that character brought you into their personal space – with their laptop open, phone out, bedding wrinkled – and just let you be? 

While these questions may sound like writing prompts, they describe my first impressions of Margaux Williamson’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA.)

Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars is on view until Aug. 3.

In the case of many artists and writers, stories about them precede them. I first became acquainted with Williamson as a character in Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be? in which she is the best friend of the narrator (Heti) and utters bombs of consolation such as: “i have always admired a lack of social obligation. in fact, i aspire to it.” 

Williamson’s show fills the third floor of the gallery with a stillness that emanates from the light-filled paintings, almost all of which are large-format works, and many of which are newly commissioned and on view for the first time.

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Margaux Williamson, “Books and Pictures,” 2023 (courtesy of the artist)

In the leading image for the show, Window Front, bags, boxes, and items on shelves are browned in the dimming light of dusk. The darkening foliage reflected in the shop window seems to grow into and out of the shelves, animating the scene with the bloom and decay that comes to all things. Beneath the window, a muted silvery gray harkens something metallic under which lime green splotches bloom like plants from a David Cronenberg flick. 

In many of Williamson’s works, the sense of perspective is both defamiliarizing and inviting. I recalled Richard Estes’ hyper-real paintings that depict storefronts and cityscapes reflected in glass windows. Like Estes, Williamson also revels in light and movement, so that even though many are still lifes, points of light (like the white specks that recur in Williamson’s paintings) animate the ephemeral quality of a scene in time.

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Margaux Williamson, “Fire and Fence,” 2025 (courtesy of the artist)

In Fire and Fence, Williamson centres a blazing fire. The whiteness of the flame is striking, but more so the fire’s bottom edge, which cuts almost clean lines focused in the centre, in contrast to the curling flames that are contained within the edges. I jokingly told my friend that it’s the most Toronto painting ever, because the city seems to be on fire every day. However, Williamson’s fire is as neatly contained as the fence. 

Several paintings such as Red Carpet depict interiors with an intimacy that is comfortable but withholding. A striped armchair faces the viewer, beyond which lies an open laptop (facing away from the armchair), a carefully gathered swirl of bedding on the wooden floor, and a table with notebooks and glass bottles. Another painting depicts a bed in a darkened room. One side of the bed is more crinkled than the other and there is a sense of solitude that emanates from the bluish bed.

Williamson’s oeuvre also depicts creative abodes with papers tacked on walls, books, flowers, and bathtubs, but regardless of the rooms, flora, and objects depicted, there is light everywhere. The reflections in Williamson’s works are not unceasing processions of simulacra, but invitations to look more closely, to immerse oneself in the private, quiet sentience of things and places that light us up, let us be, and keep their secrets too. ■

Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars is on view until Aug. 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA.)

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