Upon entering the AGNS Western Branch, in the Foyer Gallery, one finds three signature works from the Gallery’s extensive collection by two of Atlantic Canada’s leading figures in the field of representational painting: Artifacts on Astroturf (1982) by Mary Pratt and Big White Boat (2005) and Big Boat (1986) by Christopher Pratt.

Christopher Pratt paints imagined worlds built upon his memories and personal reflections of life in his native Newfoundland.  A sense of unease inhabits his complex images.  The simple subject of Big Boat, a large pleasure craft at rest in a boathouse, for instance, sets the stage for a disquieting fictive scene.  In A Brief Foray in the World of Christopher Pratt, Jeffrey Spalding envisages this scene:

"House lights dimmed, curtains drawn, spotlight centre-stage, the vessel floats like a sleek phantom, a sea creature in suspended animation.  Held up before our gaze, it waits to be enacted, to be launched.  Its character is restrained rather than restraint; a fish out of water, we sense its passive resistance, capable of unleashing its latent power.  It bides its time."

Christopher Pratt uses a careful mathematical grid-work to lay the foundation for the highly precise images he paints.  This exactness in approach is echoed in Mary Pratt’s work.  Her paintings, however, present less of an imagined or constructed space as with Christopher Pratt’s, rather, through photo-realist means, they look to document rural life, domestic experience and her memories therein.  

Artifacts on Astroturf depicts a quiet country scene that can likely be found on the veranda of a house in any small town throughout Canada.  In this painting, one is presented with an image of a red geranium that’s been planted in a teapot resting upon a cast iron table with a glass top.  Mary Pratt takes a mundane scene that might very well be looked past in its original context and elevates it in the minds and imaginations of the viewers she shares it with.