Vancouver-based artist Allyson Clay has long been interested in feminist spaces within the discursive practice of art history. Irregular Lines features recent works by Clay, including a series of interventions the artist has performed on Doreen Ehrlich’s classic textbook, Masterpieces of 20th Century Painting. In River Subversion: Twentieth Century Masterpieces, Clay immerses the book in a stream and documents it underwater. In Immarginalia and One Hundred Poems, Clay paints shapes derived from works by women artists across the book’s water-damaged spreads and over the gallery walls. As Clay notes, “I am laying a map of leaking borders—traces from the spaces of women—across pages of a familiar and internalized art history.”
Allyson Clay received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, and a MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Clay has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria; Dunlop Gallery, Regina; and Numark Gallery, Washington DC. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Clay teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
