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Meghan Myres Soars With Amelia Earhart.

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By Mike Levin

In 2010 Meghan Myres went to Afghanistan. She was an employee of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and her job was to inject some of our educational expertise into a society fractured, in part, by the government she was working for.

She doesn’t talk about the politics, just about the connections she made with the Afghans and with Canadian soldiers. Most of those emotions emerged from a long series of sketches she drew of people in and around the Canadian military base in Kandahar. “That’s part of what I was interested in—drawing the people that are often overlooked yet deeply affected and entwined with the conflict,” she said in an interview with Andrew Cox. A year later, she still sees their stories as open-ended.

Meghan Myres at the Fritzi Gallery. Photo by Mike Levin.

Myres has been an artist since youth (Canterbury, Concordia), but looking back at those sketches she realizes she missed the narrative she was after. So she did what artists do when the creative process becomes more than a sparring session; she took the hook to the jaw and came back swinging. A month ago those punches started scoring points.

The Fritzi Gallery is on the second floor of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre. Shows are curated by Cube Gallery’s Don Monet, and the Fritzi is the only art space I know of in Canada to create a cross-disciplinary dialogue with theatre – in this case, resident productions of the Great Canadian Theatre Company. In August, Monet asked Myres to create paintings that would engage the company’s Amelia: The Girl Who Wants To Fly. The results now on display are astonishing.

You don’t have to be a fan of Amelia Earhart to understand the complex motivations needed by a woman of the early 20th Century to excel in the special preserves of men.

She still remains a little girl, a dreamer standing in the

window of her house in Atchison (Kansas), looking out

and dreaming of flying. Except now she’s in the doorway

of a plane, and we don’t know who’s piloting it anymore.

The Moon, That Little Girl in a Window Sill – Memory Will Find You

– from Myres’ show catalogue.

During the past 30 days, Myres researched Earhart’s life and personality, created seven large canvases and wrote an eight-page catalogue explaining the evolution and meaning of each. This is four-six months’ work for most artists.

“I didn’t know much about her before and didn’t expect there to be (a resonance), but there was. It came out of the conflict I found in her life, about how she broke barriers and personal boundaries,” Myres says.

The Girl Who Wanted To Fly, by Meghan Myers. Photo by Mike Levin.

Most of the mixed-media paintings are dark, almost macabre, in their interpreted depiction of Earhart’s experiences. They are also a pungent juxtaposition to the theatre production’s musical lightness.

….how her loss of appreciation for the fragile wonders of

her childhood fascination with flight caused her, in many

ways, to go from flying to falling. Her hubris became her

greatest enemy and caused her to become detached from

herself, unable to save herself, and unable to grasp the

fragility of the hummingbird (symbol of eternity) on her hand.

I Believe I Knew Things Then That I’ve Forgotten – Memory Will

Find You – from Myres’ show catalogue

This show unwraps the basic premise of art: something that is recognizable and understandable yet shakes up our preconceived ideas of both. It’s also a turning point for an artist who now seems comfortable with path she’s on.

Meghan Myres left CIDA after the Afghanistan trip. She’s an occasional visual-arts teacher for the Ottawa School Board and will return to her Afghanistan sketches to find the narrative she missed the first time round. Because in her new skin, all narratives are open-ended.


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