By Chris Hampton, Special to The Hamilton Spectator, December 12, 2020

Just when it seems like everyone could use a smile, the Art Gallery of Hamilton has hung a great big grin in its lobby, right where the whole city can see.

The cheery red mobile beaming positivity onto King Street is the work of Sandra Meigs, a local artist of international renown. The AGH’s latest lobby exhibition, “Imaginal Worlds,” features two large works by Meigs, whose practice in recent years has specialized in making joy.

And these days, the artist says, “I think people need it.”

Born in Baltimore, Meigs spent the bulk of her career in Victoria, B.C., where she taught painting at the university. Three years ago, however, the Governor General’s Award-winner moved to Hamilton. From the street outside her Cannon studio in a former auto repair shop, it’s difficult to imagine the wonders that wait inside.

You’ll notice Popeye first. Standing five-foot-six — the artist’s height — her sculpture of the spinach-loving sailor is built from Ethafoam and papier mâché. Packaged on a shelf nearby are “The Little Lost Operas,” which are a recent series of small paintings and folksy handmade puppets, comprising a suite of invented spectaculars. A few of the golden-spiralled wallhangings that appeared in Meigs’s big 2017 solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario are repurposed as room dividers. 

Behind the curtains, stored beside decades of other creations and curios, the ginger-haired twin automatons of “The Glass Ticker” rest before an upcoming trip to the Morris Museum in New Jersey. A group of paintings in progress hang on the wall with three cheeky faces, tongue out, razzing the viewer. But, right now, her biggest, most pressing project is the work of documenting it all. The artist is in the final steps of compiling a major book, out next fall, surveying her incredible 40-year career. 

At the AGH, Meigs’s “The Elevators” make the perfect partner to the big, red smile hanging over the lobby. Seventy-five circular paintings — acrylic on paper — cover the two-storey wall. A brilliant montage of graphics, patterns and slogans, the array shares some hippie sensibility with a jean jacket festooned in pinback buttons. 

Meigs says that in painting each, she was trying to channel something happy. A couple, for example, say “gusto,” from the meditation prompt, “Now, with gusto, breathe.” Another wears the title of a “beautiful” Tears for Fears song. The word “gong” appears multiple times because, when Meigs made “The Elevators” in 2015, she’d recently started playing the instrument. 

The paintings are arranged into groups of five, with four discs at the corners, forming a square, connected by another disc at the centre. The shape is called a quincunx. (Imagine the five side of a game die.) “It’s such a beautiful pattern because it seems so solid,” Meigs says. “One thing supports the other … It is a very positive and energetic structure.” The groupings make icons — 15 presented in total — devoted to healing and harmony. She’s named the paintings “Elevators” because they’re meant to do just that: to brighten, to revitalize, to uplift.

The mobile and “The Elevators,” both outsize expressions of happiness, were made during what the artist calls a “period of awakening” following a deep personal loss. Meigs’s husband died in 2011. “After,” she says, “I went through a year when I couldn’t do anything.” She saw a councillor. She learned meditation. Very gradually, she says, she found some stability and began to make art again. These two projects sprang from bodies of work focused deliberately on levity, positivity and joy as a means to bring those into her life. And she hopes they might provide the same for others.

For Meigs, such is the special power of art: “whether it’s happy or sad — it brings us to the moment and it makes us reflect. That can only be good, I think.”

In hopes that a smile really is contagious, she’s shared hers with the city.

Sandra Meigs’s Imaginal Worlds is on view in the Art Gallery of Hamilton lobby through March 31, 2021, and the book The Way Between Things: The Art of Sandra Meigs will be published in Fall 2021 by ECW Press. To view the exhibition in person, head to the AGH any time before March 31, 2021! To learn more about Meigs and her work, check out her website.