January 8- February 29, 2020

I love to “dig deep” to reveal beautiful and/or interesting images that might otherwise pass unnoticed – a treasure hunt if you will. Very rarely do I start with a preconceived image. Instead, they arise from my imagination, evolving instinctively as I work. This is what excites me – the sense of discovery and innovation as I create. Fantasy forms and faces appear out of nowhere, and the process itself is an uncharted adventure, in the same way that life can be. -Madge Slavin

Madge Slavin: Works on Paper feature a selection made over several decades, one that is primarily rooted in collage; a practice she uses to structure, develop, and investigate a visual language with assembled forms. By combining torn drawings, painted fragments, and the occasional photograph one sees the diversity of her thinking and experimentation.

Several pieces from 2005 highlight the most recent development of her collage work. In "Landscape," Madge takes line drawings of the figure, tears or cuts them, and rearranges them into a landscape. The perspective is skewed, deconstructed, yet the shading hints at distance and scale. A line used to describe a hilltop is also a hip, a bent leg. The ink lines from a dress pattern seem to be measuring a torso. A head is substituted by a photo of a woman reading at a table, a plant in the foreground.

Madge has dedicated a life-long practice to drawing and painting, finding the local art community, and taking classes in every city she has lived in, beginning in 1956 at the Montreal School of Art and Design, where she earned an award for "Highest Standing in Design." She's taken Life Drawing at St. Martin's School of Art in London (1958), Life Drawing and Portraiture at The Philadelphia Museum (1959) and MIT's Student Art Association (1976-81), and Advanced Visual Design and Scientific Illustration at The Carpenter Center at Harvard University (1976-81, 1982). In 2002 Slavin completed a 4-year Diploma in Studio Art, a flagship program at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Madge Slavin (b. 1928) was born and raised in London, England. She immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s and lived for several years in Montreal and Ottawa. Her marriage in 1958 brought her to Philadelphia, where her Canadian husband was employed. Over the years, she has lived in Mexico, the Western United States, and several cities in New England, including Cambridge and Rockport, Massachusetts. She presently resides in Providence, Rhode Island.

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