MARY COLLIS: ART AGAINST COVID

Soon after the COVID lockdown was launched in Kenya, many people felt oppressed, not just by the fear that they would get attacked by this mysterious virus,

an invisible bug that no one knew what it looked like nor where it came from. Kenyans were also concerned about why it was so fearsome since few people had died before a ‘pandemic’ had been declared.

“Many more people died after they’d taken the vaccine,” Kenyan artist Mary Collis told BD Life shortly before her solo exhibition opened at the Fig & Olive Cafe in Tigoni this Saturday, June 22^nd.

Back in 2020 after people were already feeling stir-crazy under the lockdown, Mary had opened her daily online ‘exhibition’ on Facebook. Initially, she had only planned on sharing her art for a month or two, but the public response to her daily doses of sheer beauty with her brightly colored landscapes, seascapes, sketches, and elegant abstract paintings was so positive, she felt compelled to keep on sharing her online art for many more days, 245 altogether.

“My purpose was to lift people up and out of their doldrums and give them a feeling of hope,” she said.

Mary’s fans were so appreciative of her everyday online art that they found her a publisher in Unicorn Press who produced all 245 days of her online art in an exquisite little book that she entitled ‘Lifting the Day’.  The editors even insisted they include the daily descriptive captions explaining what was happening in each painting and what had inspired each one.

But her upcoming exhibition at Fig & Olive Café has less to do with lifting up hearts and souls and more to do with waking up public consciousness to the way folks are being bamboozled, ‘gaslit’ and generally brainwashed by all the fear tactics and mental manipulation associated with COVID, vaccines, face masks, and social distancing. Altogether, she felt the COVID propaganda had been so effective as to essentially lock down the world economy and the public psyche with it for many months. It had also divided people between the true believers and non-believers in COVID and the vaccines. And those same bamboozlers are still mentally manipulating the public, she noted, even as they generate more exotic, invisible bugs and more new vaccines even up to now.

“There is a lot more well-researched information now that has come out to reinforce my perspective on vaccines,” says Mary who is no longer concerned that others disagree with her point of view. What she’s more concerned with now is that people come to see her new show which she irreverently entitled ‘The Clusterfuck Series.’

It’s terminology uncommonly associated with Collis who is otherwise gracious and gentile. “But in this instance, I feel the term is appropriate since that is what we have been witnessing,” she added.

Anyone can come to Mary’s exhibition and appreciate the beauty of her newest abstract and semi-abstract paintings if they come with an open mind. Her usage of powerful primary colors is most evocative, and indicative of her having equally powerful feelings which speak more clearly than any words could do. She has evolved her own version of abstract expressionism (in the same vein as artists like Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning).

One need not dive into Mary’s world view in order to appreciate her art. There is much more going on in this show than knowing whether she seriously believes there is a minute group of wealthy elites (such as ‘Big Pharma’ who produce vaccines and make billions in the process) who are covertly calling the shots on COVID. They are ostensibly the ones who have orchestrated the whole narrative about COVID-19 and the dire consequences one is bound to suffer if he doesn’t take the vaccines. It doesn’t even matter that you don’t believe the ‘deep state’ theory, that the world has been lulled into a soporific state of mental miasma that is unlikely to end well.

Mary’s work for this show is not just about painting and curating her own exhibition. It is also about finding what she felt was the right space to have it in. She says she knew it was the Fig and Olive from the moment she found it. The only drawbacks to it are its distance from Nairobi’s CBD (Its much closer to Limuru town) and the fact it has more window than walls.

 “But we’ll work it out,” Mary speaking confidently that the show will go on from 10am tomorrow morning.