"Margot Cormier Splane"

"I call my style 'Reality with a Twist', because it is very realistic, but unlike anything you would ever see," Splane says. Splane's "Reality with a Twist" perhaps more closely approaches reality than "anything you would ever see" as these paintings incorporate experiential reality into visual reality. What one perceives visually inevitably triggers associative thoughts and memories, which Splane asserts are no less real than what one sees. The seen and imagined are endowed with the same verisimilitude so that the viewer is unable to distinguish the two. Some of these works have a meta element to them and point out how strange it is that illusions (which most paintings are) are often used to get a closer grasp of reality.

Splane's work deals with a wide variety of themes including the modern versus the primitive and technology versus nature. Airplanes fly alongside geese and buffalo and cattle roam in unusual proximity to a locomotive. Splane cannot help but be retrospective and think about how the emergence of one thing means the diminishing of another. She is also a deliberate artist with precise reasons for the components of the composition, which has the paradoxical effect of allowing the viewer the freedom to experience what the works might mean to him.

-Eugene Hwang