Exhibition by Austin artist Christine Garvey, using 19th-century stage magic imagery to explore archetypes of women and motherhood.
Christine Garvey is showing Parlour Tricks at Ivester Contemporary from September 11 through October 17, 2026. It's a new body of work from the Austin artist, and the title points straight to where she's drawing her imagery: 19th-century stage magic.
Garvey made these pieces during her second maternity leave, throughout the first year of her second child's life. The work continues her exploration of female archetypes, mythology, and motherhood, and it pulls from a few different places at once. She draws on classical painting and Greek and Roman myth, but she layers in the mechanics of the old-school magic stage — levitating women, bodies sawed in half, theatrical illusions — and uses them as vehicles for thinking about transcendence and belief. There's also the devotional language of patron saints in there, which she uses to pull archetypal female figures out of idealization and make them feel more contradictory, vulnerable, and human. Garvey describes the show as an invitation for women to shed the "voyeur within" and imagine what new mythologies might emerge if women authored them rather than inherited them.
It's a fairly wide-reaching set of references, and the personal context of when it was made — in the middle of a second maternity leave — sits right alongside the larger themes of motherhood and the roles women are expected to play. If you've seen her work before, this feels like an expansion of those same questions, just with a new set of images to work with.
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Garvey's work has been shown internationally and recognized with a Fulbright Research Grant, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and a 2026 Nexus Artist Grant from the City of Austin; her drawings were published in Mother Tongue magazine. The show was reviewed by James Scott. You can find it at Ivester Contemporary, 916 Springdale Rd, Austin, TX 78702, running through October 17.
