Artist Margaux Williamson’s Exhibition at MOCA Toronto Is an Exaltation of the Everyday

Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars. Almost everyone can look around and point to these commonplace items, which are so ubiquitous that they might go unnoticed if not deliberately called to mind. The list is also the title of a new exhibition of paintings by artist Margaux Williamson, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto until August 3, 2025.

Not all of these items are found in Williamson’s paintings, however. The words are pulled from a quote by Canadian American painter Philip Guston, who said at a talk at the University of Minnesota in March 1978, “I must have done hundreds of paintings of shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, just everyday objects. And the more I did, the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough; I don’t think one needs to depart from it to think about art.”

For this exhibition, Williamson doesn’t stray much further than her Toronto home and studio for creative inspiration. She continues themes explored in her recent retrospective Interiors, which opened at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2021 and travelled across Canada until 2023. This presentation includes pieces from that exhibition, some from as early as 2006, as well as many newly commissioned works.

Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation.

The paintings, mostly large-scale, have titles such as Dried Flowers, Table and Chairs, Bathtub, and Window, but they are about much more than their apparent subjects. “Domesticity always gets connected with being trapped, but for me, a room is, like, an infinite amount of space,” Williamson says in Expanding the Present, a video about her McMichael exhibition.

At the MOCA show, we see creased bedsheets, running faucets, stacks of books, scattered pages, and a green lettuce wrapped in blue cellophane, its leaves waiting to be washed, dried, and dressed for dinner. Many of the most elucidating investigations into one’s interiority start in solitary spaces while performing simple actions: languishing in bed, soaking in a tub, reading, cleaning, cooking. “The landscape of my life has always been a messy room, or a clean room, or some private space that’s just for me,” Williamson says.

Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation.

Rather than occupying the position of voyeur, we are invited to inhabit these intimate scenes from the artist’s point of view. The eye lands on a rumpled pink sock balanced on the edge of the bed frame in Birds, 2024, or the soft glow of the plug-in nightlight in Unmade Bed, 2023. Focus on these inconsequential objects for long enough and feel the lifting effect of a mind impelled to wander.

“All of these paintings are a bit of a refuge from words,” says Williamson, who is also a writer and filmmaker. Her works at MOCA are devoid of people, and the only pieces that gesture toward social interaction are of fires, which often serve as centrepieces for silent gatherings.

Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025. Photo: LF Documentation.

Williamson’s compositions are poetic and associative, loose and easy, and perspectively impossible. Objects hover, angles are askew, and as the tableaux veer toward the boundaries of their frames, they might dissolve into white-hot light or collapse into a mass of formless brushstrokes.

In the most overtly dreamlike work, River and Alleyway, a stream is suspended in midair against a concrete wall and a metal door, whose frame bends where it is intersected by the water. “It’s painting,” Williamson says. “You can do whatever you want.”

SHARE