For more than 35 years, Sandra Meigs has been creating paintings and sculptural works that combine dense narratives with comic elements, hinting always toward multiple meanings. With talent at her craft that is beyond question she ventures into unexpected arenas, always steeped with human experience. In a review for Canadian Art magazine Nancy Tousley writes, “Her work insistently tests the line between the rational and irrational, order and chaos…. Like an adolescent with a wild streak, she revels in extremes and contradictions or, if not that, approaches them without flinching.” (Winter, 1997) Meigs has been engaged in art making as a participant at Alberta’s McIntyre Ranch. Her passion for the Grasslands has been evident in the resulting paintings, many of which will be on show at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) in September 2019.
Sandra Meigs was born in Baltimore Maryland and moved to Canada in 1973. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and went on to complete her Master of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. She taught art for over 25 years, most of those years spent at the University of Victoria. Since her retirement from teaching, she moved to Hamilton, Ontario where she lives and works. In 2015 Meigs was the recipient of a Governor Generals Award in Arts. That same year she was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in Visual Art. In 2017 she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has been featured in numerous exhibitions including a 2017 solo presentation entitled Room For Mystics at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work is in the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal and the Canada Council Art Bank among others.
