GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY

Join the Mitchell Art Gallery in celebrating GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY, with an artist talk on Thursday, September 19 at 5PM, followed by an opening reception from 6 – 8PM.

Mary Imrie (1918 — 1988) and Jean Wallbridge (1912 — 1979) operated their architecture firm — the first run by women in Canada — at Six Acres, the home they built for their work and life together overlooking the North Saskatchewan River in west Edmonton. When Mary Imrie passed away, she bequeathed the records of their remarkable architectural practice and adventurous life, along with their home, to the province of Alberta. With a title borrowed from a telegram in the collection, GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY is Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s immersive exhibition that playfully imagines and speculates in the spaces between the correspondence, amateur super‑8 recordings, and modernist buildings that Imrie and Wallbridge left behind.

McKinney and Meyer’s collaborative practice is rooted in how queer history lives in research and archives. Their work treats archives as more than places to establish official historical narratives, but as sites for fantasizing, questioning, and feeling amongst objects and ephemera, and the relevance those items hold in our contemporary moment. When drawing from the archive of Imrie and Wallbridge, McKinney and Meyer’s approach to artmaking amplifies the resonance of these lovers and architects’ exceptional lives in ways that documents alone cannot.