Artist Statement & Biography

Since 2003 Musgrave has researched the interdisciplinary practice of “visual music” or “intermedia synthesis”, continuing a discourse, which she sees as stretching across history from early philosophers, such as Pythagoras or Plato, to artist/musicians such as Wassily Kandinsky, John Cage and Fluxus. In endeavoring to express commonalities of sound and vision, she has developed motives and patterns to express audiovisual experiences. Her paintings are investigations into the juxtaposition of visual structures, which have an inherent suggestion of sound. The picture plane becomes an integration of these dualistic audiovisual elements from the plastic/graphic patterns to the organic natural shapes, from the psychedelic to reality, from symphonic sound to silence, or from movement to stillness. The result of which are paintings that could be described as a threshold between utopia and dystopia, or a synesthesic landscape in constant fluctuation. By envisioning a world in flux, she invites the viewer to step into a sensory experience, which is unknown, disintegrating, and changing while also, remaining intriguing, familiar, and comforting. She sees the creation of such a work to be an act of optimism – that within such a painterly process, that which is unfamiliar or fearful becomes reconciled or pleasurable to look at.

Musgrave was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1983. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2005) from Mount Allison University, obtaining the honors of the “John P. Asimakos Painting Award” and the “Crake Performance Award in Fine Arts”. Since her graduation she has had successful solo exhibits at the private gallery “Ingrid Mueller Arts and Concepts”, was awarded the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s “Studio Watch: Emerging Artist for 2007”, has two of her works in the permanent collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, showed at the New Brunswick Museum and the 2008 International Toronto Art Fair. She has been a lecturer across Canada for artistic conferences and teaches drawing and painting at the university and college level in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She is currently pursuing a Master’s of Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Art and Psychology.