Mary Kainer

Mary Kainer’s artistic practice addresses the political, the personal and the purely visual through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and installation.  Conceptually her work travels though representation, illustration, process, obsessive construction, colour and form.  

Kainer’s work tackles difficult topics – environmental devastation, global corporate domination, fracking, mining, deforestation, and most recently aging and infirmity. Her images draw on biomorphic forms vacillating between the real and surreal.  Data and information and simultaneously presented as text and schematized images are imbued with collage elements that contain informational fragments.  The mutant images and incendiary information are meant to disturb and challenge the viewer.

Born in Saskatchewan, Kainer has lived, worked, volunteered and raised three children in Toronto, working as planner, administrator and community activist. Her artistic practice is informed by these experiences.  She pursued her art studies at the Toronto School of Art including a final year in the Independent Studio Program and she has served as a director on the boards of Toronto School of Art and ASpace Gallery.  

In 2015, her Fracking series drew first prize in the John B. Aird’s Contemporary Drawing Exhibition. In 2017 Kainer was awarded Ontario Arts Council’s mid-career artists grant.   Exhibitions of her work have been shown at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery, ASpace Gallery, Propeller Gallery and the Rebecca Gallery.  Her works have also been shown in No Man’s Land/Erring on the Mount, Triple X, Contact, and in studio tours.