Margo Ray

Margo Ray is a visual artist who engages in printmaking, collage and installation. She holds an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, a BA in Studio Arts from University of Hawai'i at Hilo, as well as a certificate from Peking University’s summer program in Beijing, China. She was born on O’ahu in 1976, raised on Hawai’i Island and has had the opportunity to travel throughout her life. She has been awarded artist residencies at St. Michael’s Printshop in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Atelier de I’île in Val David, Québec and Kala Art Institute in Oakland, California. In 2013 she was Honolulu Printmaker’s Gift Print Artist and the Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts has purchased six of her works for their public collection. Margo’s works have been exhibited in venues such as Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, VA), The Honolulu Museum of Art at First Hawaiian Center (Honolulu, HI), Parisian Laundry (Montréal, QC), the Hawai’i State Art Museum (Honolulu, HI), The Schaefer International Gallery (Kahului, HI) and most recently at The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA). Margo is co-owner of Island Eclectic, an art handling business, and lives in Waimea, Hawai’i in the ahupuaʻa pu'u kapu with her husband and their two children.

Growing up and living on an island creates a sense of isolation. In my artwork I incorporate imagery of infrastructure and architecture that communicates this sense of solitude. I reconstruct landscapes based on my energetic or spiritual interpretation of a place, bringing attention to the multiplicity of marks made on a location, by plants, animals, and humans alike. In my work I have established an iconic language inspired by the rural Hawaiian landscape, utilizing collage, print media, and installation. This iconography populates surreal geographies of beauty, color and line in an ongoing narrative of decay and abundance. Using the allegory of landscape, I explore notions of displacement, vulnerability and authenticity as well as my relationship to natural and supernatural worlds; drawing attention to the complicated triangulation of relationships between man, land, and animal and notions of invasiveness and belonging.

CV

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