Christine Garvey: Parlour Tricks

Ivester Contemporary is pleased to present Parlour Tricks, a solo exhibition by Austin-based artist Christine Garvey. Created primarily during Garvey’s second maternity leave and the first year of her second child’s life, the exhibition expands her ongoing exploration of female archetypes, mythology, and motherhood. Drawing from the visual language of classical painting and Greek and Roman myth, Garvey reconsiders inherited representations of women through figures of her own making. Messy, feral, mystical, and occasionally hostile, these recurring characters resist the fixed ideals of traditional mythology and instead reflect the psychological complexity of being a woman and mother in a post-Roe v. Wade America. In Parlour Tricks, Garvey introduces the imagery and mechanics of 19th-century stage magic into this evolving symbolic language. Levitating women, bodies sawed in half, theatrical illusions, and other feats of apparent impossibility become vehicles for exploring transcendence and belief. Garvey is particularly interested in what happens when the mechanics of a “miracle” are revealed. By looking behind the curtain, she similarly pulls archetypal female figures out of the realm of idealization and fantasy, allowing them to become more contradictory, vulnerable, and human. Alongside references to magic and stagecraft, the works evoke the devotional language of patron saints, asking what overlooked experiences and psychological states might deserve icons of their own. At the center of Parlour Tricks is a larger question about who gets to create the stories and symbols through which women understand themselves. Garvey considers the often-unrepresented “underbelly” of motherhood and imagines what new mythologies might emerge if women authored them rather than inherited them. Garvey’s work has been exhibited internationally and recognized through a Fulbright Research Grant, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and, most recently, a 2026 Nexus Artist Grant from the City of Austin supporting the production of this exhibition. Her drawings were also recently published in Mother Tongue magazine.