The McMaster Museum of Art
Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century
September 3 - November 5, 2011
Public Reception: Thursday September 15, 6-8 pm
Artist's Talk by Tony Scherman:
Thursday September 29 at 6 pm
Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century is the governing title for exhibition-episodes that explore facets of culture and society in the 18th century—ideas, rather than attempts to tell the story of art as history. But art has a value in a historical reckoning—it does rise to the occasion, and allows both a mirror and lens perspective.
The choice of exhibition works interweaves the historical and the contemporary in order to open up different discussions—the legacies of the 18th century—enlightenment, empiricism, revolution and innovation and the instability of these ideas, as they speak to our unstable time. The keynote episode is borrowed directly from the title of Rebecca Belmore's Rising to the Occasion. The original occasion was Belmore's response to the Duke and Duchess of York's official visit to Canada in 1987; she cobbled together and wore a hybrid-material dress in the manner and style of the 19th century. The new context is the inclusion of John Verelst's so-described "Four Indian Kings" paintingswhich were commissioned by Queen Anne in 1710. The now disembodied Belmore dress as object-artifact has a resonance with Jean-Antoine Houdon's 1767 life-sized plaster flayed figure—sculpted to show the body muscles—and in turn George Romney's portrait with an écorché figure.
Paintings by Jean-Joseph Taillasson and Angelica Kauffmann, draw their subject matter from the classical world to send messages to their "18th century present." Taillasson's audience was the new social order of post-Revolutionary France; for Kauffmann, a subject that could appeal to the heroic—in the wake of the first "global" Seven Years War—and her metatext on the role of women. A contemporary counterpoint is Tony Scherman's monumental Napoleon painting, from his About 1789 series, which Scherman describes as a forensic portrait. Likewise, John Massey's 1985 photo-collage serigraph Versailles is another forensic moment and constructed embodiment; an arm of collaged gold that cannot rise, gripped by the arm of the artist. Angela Grauerholz's black and white photograph Voltaire's Study (Voltaire was one of the great writer and humanists of the 18th century) has a subtle counterpoint in Taillasson's painting, as Jiri Ladocha's suite of Voltaire portraits have with the Houdon figure. Ladocha worked with a mould from Houdon's Voltaire portrait bust, reconstructed as if it were a Cubist vision—the deep past, the historical modern, and the present.
Rising to the Occasion is mounted in conjunction with and as a complement to the McMaster University John Douglas Taylor Conference "The Immaterial Eighteenth Century," October 27-29, 2011.
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List of Works in Exhibition
Thomas Gainsborough (English 1727-1788)
Jean-Antoine Houdon (French 1741-1828)
Angelica Kauffmann (Swiss 1741-1807)
Rebecca Belmore (Anishinabe b.1960)
Tony Scherman (Canadian b. 1950)
Angela Grauerholz (Canadian b. Germany 1952)
John Massey (Canadian b.1950)
Jiri Ladocha (Canadian b. Bohemia, Czechoslovakia 1942)
Jean-Joseph Taillasson (French 1745-1809)
George Romney (English 1727-1788) of an Écorché Figure to His Son, Robert Edward, 1775-76
Nathaniel Dance (English 1735-1811)
William Woollett (English 1735-1785)
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John Verelst—The Four Kings
Onigoheriago (baptized John). Named Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row, King of the Generethgarich Onigoheriago (baptized John). Named Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row, King of the Generethgarich
Etowaucum (baptized Nicholas). Named Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation Etowaucum (baptized Nicholas). Named Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation
Sagayenkwaraton (baptized Brant). Named Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawk) Sagayenkwaraton (baptized Brant). Named Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawk)
Tejonihokarawa (baptized Hendrick). Named Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations Tejonihokarawa (baptized Hendrick). Named Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations |