McBride Contemporain gallery is delighted to announce Songs From Angel Planet, a solo exhibition by Montreal-based artist Rebecca Munce. This new series of works delves deeper and more directly than ever into the spiritual life of human beings, exploring our mythologies relating to the otherworldly and the depiction of supernatural beings. The whimsical and lyrical qualities characteristic of Munce’s work are counterbalanced by a profound seriousness in depicting this universe, and in the artist’s determination to develop a visual language that can account for this enormous subject on her own terms. Drawing on her religious upbringing and its pervasive sense of the numinous, Munce employs the notion of the divine and the profane, to juxtapose two planes of existence, and then collide them together with dramatic pictorial effect.

Perhaps we are on another planet in this work, a canny notion that seems to invoke the science fictional, but still it is a spiritually active world, a realm where the membrane between the two realities has been punctured. Herself eschewing models of institutionalized religions and maintaining a personal sense of skepticism and open-mindedness in general, Munce nonetheless does profess belief in a nameless spirituality, akin to ultimate reality. Her need to mystify and in some respects send up this kind of imagery and belief system is a part of her approach, like the divine and profane elements in each picture she has created. But these also find their counterpart in this revelation of a celestial reality, one we have access to aesthetically, and also perhaps via faith in its existence.

These potent images of mortal beings interacting with and interrogating an angelic host operate on several levels. They are illustrative while telling lovely and entertaining stories about the possibility of the divine coming into our awareness. They act as beautifully honest and searching displays of belief. Even if they are not literally exact, they embody a certain gnosis, some knowledge of, and relationship to the divine, living as we do with all our profane and limited physical realities.

Press Release and Images via McBride Contemporain.