This exhibition of Victoria painter Sandra Meigs's work, presented in 2009 in conjunction with the National Arts Centre's B.C. Scene, takes its title, Strange Loop, from a book by American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. Meigs's new paintings of architectural interiors, based on her studies of 19th-century seaside mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, are inspired by Hofstadter's understanding of consciousness as a loop joining the outside world and the inner self. Meigs's paintings, rendered in perspectival line on soft, grey grounds, are curiously animated, "cerebral" architectural interiors that are full of comic twists and turns, shifting our attention from architectural form to psychological content. As Diana Nemiroff astutely observes in her catalogue essay, with their ghostlike occupants and their ascending and descending staircases moving from surface to depth, the paintings transform the interiors of these comfortable old houses into appropriately "loopy" metaphors for the mind. Catalogue design by Robert Tombs.

Diana Nemiroff is a Canadian curator and art historian in the field of contemporary art. She holds an MA in art history from Concordia University where she was awarded the Alfred E. Pinsky Medal for the highest-ranking graduating student in the Faculty of Fine Arts. In 2012, she was the recipient of a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. Nemiroff has held positions as director of Carleton University Art Gallery, senior curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and also held assistant and associate curator positions with the Gallery. She has numerous exhibitions to her credit, including the ground-breaking Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (1992), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (co-curated with Robert Houle and Charlotte Townsend-Gault), which was the National Gallery's first major exhibition featuring the accomplishments of a new generation of Aboriginal artists; Crossings / Traversées (1998), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Melvin Charney and Kzrysztof Wodiczko (1986) for the 42nd Venice Biennale.

Diana Nemiroff's profile page