JoAnne Artman Gallery will present The Things We Keep, a solo exhibition of new work by Mary Finlayson, whose pictorial interiors are built from saturated color, flattened perspective, and layered pattern. The presentation examines how everyday possessions—furniture, plants, books, artworks, and family heirlooms—operate as repositories of memory and reflections of the self.
The exhibition frames the home as both subject and structure. Finlayson’s compositions translate domestic space into narrative arrangements in which familiar objects carry specific emotional weight. By foregrounding what people choose to live with and preserve, the works consider attachment, nostalgia, and the ways personal history becomes legible through material surroundings.
Finlayson draws on a lineage that includes Henri Matisse, David Hockney, and the sensibility of California’s light-driven modernism. Rather than aiming at documentary realism, she uses rhythm, surface, and repetition to emphasize how pattern can function as a connective tissue between memory and place, encouraging viewers to read interiors as portraits of identity.
Across this body of work, color relationships and motif density serve as structural devices. Tables, chairs, textiles, plants, and framed pictures become signposts that chart lived experience. The approach positions domestic arrangements not as neutral backdrops but as curated environments that record attention, taste, and biography over time.
Born in Vancouver in 1982, Finlayson lives and works in San Francisco. She studied at Queen’s University and completed graduate work in art therapy and arts education, training that informs the psychological dimension of her interiors. Her career includes residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and Facebook’s Artist-in-Residence program in San Francisco. In addition to solo exhibitions, her work has appeared in public commissions with organizations such as Asana, Google, and Anthropologie, and in private collections internationally.
The Things We Keep will be on view at JoAnne Artman Gallery, 346 N Coast Hwy, Laguna Beach, California. The presentation situates Finlayson’s recent paintings within ongoing questions about how objects accrue meaning and how interior spaces can signal identity as clearly as a conventional portrait.
Venue and dates: JoAnne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach — December 1, 2025 to February 15, 2026.
