Notice Board

Rhythmic Couplets reading/performance 

McTrowe will be reading from her recently self-published artist book, Rhythmic Couplets. The original text on which McTrowe’s work was based is a selection from Olive M. Wyatt’s 1961 book, Lip-Reading, from the Teach Yourself series. Wyatt’s text, entitled “Rhythmic ‘Couplets’”, is a list of thirty-nine familiar word pairs, the recitation of which are meant “(t)o train the mind’s acceptance of rhythm in speech; concentration; relaxation through that acceptance; and the readier recognition of the shape in the clue words and the flow of the sentence-building which the rhythm enhances… These ‘couplets’ or word-pairs come easily to your mind, because they are rhythmic and familiar.” For her Rhythmic Couplets, McTrowe has recombined Wyatt’s text to create thirty-eight additional lists.

Mary-Anne McTrowe was born and raised in southern Alberta, where she earned her B.F.A. at the University of Lethbridge in 1998. She went on to pursue graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal, and received her M.F.A. in studio art in 2001. Her work has spanned a number of different media, and her practice focuses on the question of how things that are familiar to us can be made unfamiliar; how a change in context can render something temporarily strange and perhaps even unrecognizable. Recent bodies of work include using crochet as a carrier of information, the crocheting of cozies for everyday objects, and performance and static work about the sasquatch. McTrowe is a member of the folk art-ernative band The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonoréalistes with Daniel Wong, was a founding member of Trap\door Artist Run Centre, and currently works as a technician in the art department at the University of Lethbridge.