Margaux Williamson

Margaux Williamson (born in 1976) is a Canadian painter, filmmaker, and writer based out of Toronto.

Williamson’s paintings are meant to be understood in part as "a philosophical investigation of the landscape around her, as well as dedicated rigour and formal exploration into the development and possibilities of painting as a medium".

Through her work she has created a highly personal visual language which she uses to explore themes of subjecthood, storytelling, life, death, aging and tension.

Although dealing with dark and heavy themes, Williamson's works are ultimately hopeful, exploring the possibility of light in darkness.

Williamson's works are often intertextual with her references ranging from popular culture to objects she finds lying around her studio.

In her work she is unafraid to reference and draw on art history, specifically finding inspiration from artists such as "Goya, Manet, Duchamp, Luc Tuymans and Philip Guston over the years".

Williamson was born in 1976 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lived in the United States for thirteen years.

In 1989, she and her family moved to Waterloo, Ontario.

After settling in Canada, Williamson was accepted into the BFA program at Queen's University in 1996 and graduated in 1999.

In 1998, she spent one semester at the Glasgow School of Art, where she studied film.

In 2000, Williamson moved to Toronto, where she currently resides with her son Billy.

Williamson's former partner is Misha Glouberman, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosophy.

Notably, Glouberman has also collaborated with Williamson's friend and oft co-creator Sheila Heti.

Glouberman and Heti worked together to create the novel The Chairs Are Where the People Go.

In this collaboration piece Heti transcribed Glouberman's knowledge regarding communication and also edited the novel.

They dedicated the book to Williamson.

Katharine Mulherin was the first individual who exhibited Williamson work in the 2000s.

Over Williamson's career Katharine Mulherin has had a major influence on Willamson and has had a tremendous impact on the success of her career.

Willamson has exhibited her works at many of Mulherin's galleries.

When they first began working together, Mulherin tried to keep the prices of Williamson's art accessible, but there was an increasingly high demand for her work.

Katherine Mulherin was described as the "woman who built Queen West, because Mulherin helped in converting a once run down area of the city into a thriving center for art and culture through creating galleries that exhibited many exciting artists."

One of the pieces Williamson worked on during her residency at the AGO was a film entitled Teenager Hamlet.

The film recalls and reframes the narrative of Hamlet.

With this work, Williamson constructed a fiction out of documentary footage consisting primarily of reality-based interviews and scenarios set up between her friends and neighbors.

Williamson took on the role of director for this film, and in doing so she left the comfort zone of her studio and began an exploration into filmmaking.

Williamson stated that she wanted to "become a woman of action" and this film can be understood as both an opportunity for her to do so, and also to explore what being a person of action truly meant.

Around 2006 Williamson found herself in a creative rut, and so she took a hiatus from painting and began a collaborative effort with Sheila Heti.

From this friendship grew Williamson's film Teenager Hamlet and Heti's novel How Should a Person Be?.

Heti's novel is a fictionalized representation of her relationship to Williamson, and features both women as the main characters.

Williamson describes her experience of being fictionalized as transformative for how she thought about her own art, saying it made her realize that she could never present a full picture of herself through art.

Also featured in the novel is “Misha”, Williamson's long time partner.

Since 2006, the pair have worked together so frequently they decided to form a production company called "The Production Front", "so they could do things with other artists and call it one thing".

For the release of Teenager Hamlet and How Should a Person Be? Williamson and Heti also partnered with Toronto band Tomboyfriend.

The band contributed to the soundtrack of Teenager Hamlet, and participated in a joint premier of Teenager Hamlet, How Should a Person Be? and the release of the band's first album.

Williamson and Heti collaborated once again in 2012 on Williamson's project How to Act in the Real World as part of her residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

At the end of her residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Willamson collaborated again with the band Tomboyfriend.

Her final work for the residency was to create a video for one of Tomboyfriend's songs, "End of Poverty".

The video was premiered alongside a performance by the band.

This performance, and Willamson's other performative works, pushed the boundaries of the gallery and were somewhat different from regular exhibitions.

The video that was shown was composed of YouTube videos and was described as "an uncomfortable, hilarious, and ultimately heartwarming compilation of teenagers dancing alone in their bedrooms and bathrooms".