Karin McGinn

I am a visual artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Calgary, Alberta (Treaty 7). My work explores the poetics and politics of the body as a site of personal mythology—a place of reclamation to reimagine my own lived experiences. I use painting, primarily airbrush, to create surreal, and often erotic imagery that blurs the line between beauty and monstrosity, fantasy and embodiment. 

Working within a lens of magical realism, I create visual narratives that center strong female archetypes, using humor and fantasy to subvert cultural scripts around sexuality, femininity, and agency. My figures are often fragmented, concealed, or symbolically represented—inviting viewers into a space where desire and selfhood are constantly negotiated.

Airbrush offers a softness that mirrors the slipperiness of dreamscapes and escapism, allowing me to construct otherworldly environments where the surreal becomes a language of empowerment, self-governance, and my personal iconography of beauty.

Ultimately, my work seeks to hold space for feminine complexity: for the sacred, the strange, the celebratory and the emotional. Through each image, I seek to understand these stories that my body holds- where memory, desire and deeply felt meaning intersect.