MissMe | The Apology of Anger, Toronto

MissMe is a Montreal-based street artist known for her fearless feminist iconography. In this latest body of work, The Apology of Anger, the artist uses signature motifs to engage with a contentious contemporary dialogue surrounding gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. This prescient and poignant show challenges the patriarchy and confronts uncomfortable truths about the lived experiences of marginalized identities.

For the first time in a number of years the artist conducted a new photoshoot entitled “The Sisters,” upon which her original paintings are based. These paintings are a layering of two languages, the first a portrait in graphite or charcoal and the second a spontaneous medley of bold, textural gestures. The time-consuming, detail-oriented nature of the first is an ode to the tight confines women’s bodies are expected to occupy in order to be socially acceptable. Women are conditioned to compose themselves, to take up less space. MissMe breaks free of this internalized need for control and embraces the loud, the brazen, and the imperfect with her secondary layer of thick black paint, collage, and marker. You can feel the weight of the artist’s hand as she is empowered by slashing through the perfectly composed body underneath.

For The Apology of Anger, the artist also produced a series of twenty-five “Selfies”. These are her response to the living in a society where our entire identity is boiled down to a social media presence. MissMe has struggled to see herself accurately reflected back to her in filtered Instagram posts and instead turned to these collaged compositions, each one an intense vignette of emotion. The “Selfies” emerged from the artist’s signature mask – a pillar of her practice that all her models don for their portraits. Speaking from her own experience as well as what she has witnessed in her models, the anonymity offered by the mask allows women a repose from the socially and culturally imposed expectations of femininity.