Toronto-based artist, composer and curator E.C. Woodley draws on McMaster’s art collection and Museum archives in a new curatorial project and exhibition The Last Things Before the Last.

Public Reception: Friday June 1, 6 – 8 pm
Curator’s Talk by E.C. Woodley: Wednesday June 6 at 12:30 pm

The exhibition, which runs May 24 – August 18, 2012, includes works by Stephen Andrews, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Ken Currie, Max Dean, Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ludwig Meidner, Edvard Munch, Christiane Pflug, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, and others. This exhibition is presented as a complement to the McMaster Museum of Art’s 125 & 45: an interrogative spirit exhibition celebrating the University and Museum’s anniversaries.

The Last Things Before the Last resurrects fragments of two earlier exhibitions at the McMaster Museum of Art (MMA) within a new configuration of works from the collection. The reconstructed elements are from artist Alexander Pilis’s 2010-2011 curatorial endeavour The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt and from the 1994 installation that opened the new building of the MMA, featuring the donated collection of Herman Levy as it once hung in the Levy family home. These exhibition fragments are incorporated into a new composition with its own associational counterpoint on the theme of disappearance and reappearance. More particularly, the new configuration draws on the breadth of the time span of the MMA collections – from a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris tomb figure (1,000-500 B.C) across First World War-era pages of the Levy family photo album to Toronto artist Max Dean’s self portrait Chair Without Front Legs from the 2011 series Objects Waiting. Outside the traditional format of exhibition-making that is structured around a delimited time frame, an art historical period, and/or a chronological form of presentation, this seemingly ‘ahistorical’ exhibition invites an excess of history.

The research, exhibition and brochure were produced in collaboration with University of Toronto MVS Curatorial Studies Program, where E.C. Woodley is a candidate.