Mary Scott

b. 1948, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

As a painter, Mary Scott has consistently pushed the boundaries of what painting is.

In the mid-1980s, after working as Assistant Head of Visual Arts at the Banff Centre (1982–1984), Scott’s work began to consider the relationship between surface and ground, image and text, disruption and order. Her series Imago, from the Latin word for “image,” explores Lacan’s idea of the idealized image or archetype—and the phallocentrism which French feminists sought to subvert. Imago, (viii) translatable <<is That Which Denies>> is a length of deconstructed silk cloth—not woven but un-woven. The central panel is  embroidered with the abstracted image of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing the overhead cross-section of a man and women engaged in coitus.