Finding the Bard in Contemporary Portraiture
January 11 to June 10, 2007
The exhibition Finding the Bard in Contemporary Portraiture, curated by Judith Nasby, features works by sixteen Canadian artists who engage the portrait genre: Mary Aski-Piyesiwiskwew Longman, Susan Bozic, Jaclyn Conley, Oswaldo DeLeón Kantule, FASTWÜRMS, Verne Harrison, Andrew Harwood, Fiona Kinsella, Lyne Lapointe, Stephen Livick, Shelley Niro, Evan Penny, Ryan Price, Shannon Reynolds, Cheryl Ruddock, and Jean-Paul Tousignant.
Since the seventeenth century, when the artist’s primary objective was to make an accurate visual depiction of a person, portraiture has changed dramatically. Today portraits are idiosyncratic, evocative, and broadly open to interpretation by the artist and the viewer alike, rather than literal representations. This exhibition of contemporary portraiture reveals the influence of William Shakespeare on contemporary notions of character and serves as a counterpoint to the Sanders seventeenth-century oil-on-panel.
Six of the featured artists were invited to create new works for the exhibition. Hamilton artist Fiona Kinsella’s reliquary sculpture, titled (cake) Patron Saint of England (Feast Day of St. George, April 23rd. Protector against poison.), draws parallels between St. George, England, Shakespeare, Canada, and Guelph. Montreal artist Lyne Lapointe’s painting,
titled The Hobby Horse, envisions Shakespeare as a toy hobby horse, a contemporary symbol of gay culture. Guelph artist Ryan Price’s oversized Bottom Head (2007) is a wearable mask that recalls the comedic Nick Bottom from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Nasby also repositions existing portraits by Canadian artists within a Shakespearean framework, acknowledging the Shakespeare effect at work. Saulteau artist Mary Aski-Piyesiwiskwew Longman’s sculpture, titled Elk Man Waiting for Love (1996), depicts a nude male figure with the head and antlers of an elk; he cups two stones intertwined with strands of hair, and emits the elk’s urgent bay from a hidden audio tape (on loan from the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program and funding from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation). Longman’s Elk Man enacts a Plains courting ritual, but is cast here as an image of unrequited love, a theme that permeates Shakespeare’s plays.
Other works selected for this exhibition illustrate the art historical lineage from Shakespeare’s day to the present. Toronto-based Evan Penny’s extraordinarily realistic sculptural Self-Portrait (2003) reinforces representation as a construct (on loan from William R. and Sydney Pieschel, courtesy of the TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary). From a frontal view, Penny’s sculpture projects from the wall as though the artist himself stands in the gallery; from an oblique view the sculpture is dramatically foreshortened. In the time of Shakespeare, artists experimented with anamorphism, the mathematical distortion of an image that is visually incomprehensible from one perspective, yet clearly visible from another. With this sculpture, Penny utilizes the principles of sixteenth-century anamorphism in the construction of a post-modern art work.
The artists selected for this exhibition extend our ideas of what constitutes a portrait with intriguing works that explore characterization and human nature. They do so in ways that reference Shakespeare—sometimes unconsciously. Portraiture provides an important medium for articulating issues of identity, through contemporary and historical narratives and allegorical symbolism. The metaphorically rich literary and historical references in this exhibition engage the viewer in an ongoing inquiry into the role of portraiture in contemporary visual culture.
Images:
Top: Fiona Kinsella, (cake) Patron Saint of England (Feast Day of St. George, April 23rd. Protector against poison.)
Royal icing, pearls, teeth, dirt, seeds, horse hair, skin, silver, morning dew, cloth, armour, hair of a woman, molasses, cup, icon, wild rose, hemlock, hebenon, water, spirits, sword, cuff links, sleep, redpath, fondant icing.
Hamilton, Burlington, Guelph, New Brunswick, Prague.
Centre left: Lyne Lapointe, The Hobby Horse, 2006
(wood, paper, oil paint, metal, pearl, printed photograph)
Purchased with funds raised by the Art Centre volunteers, and with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 2006
Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection