For those who missed it, or would like to review it, we recorded the formal portion of his presentation. Watch it now:

Michael Allgoewer’s exhibition 1514  includes nine recent sculptural and mixed media works. It is on view at the McMaster Museum of Art until March 16, 2019.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michael Allgoewer is a Hamilton-based artist. He was born in Montreal in 1954 and studied briefly at the Ontario College of Art in the mid 1980s. He has shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions, in both public and private galleries. His work ranges from installation, emphasizing a connection with history and myth, often incorporating re-contextualized found material; to paintings which are abstract and rigorous in concept and execution.

Michael Allgoewer is represented by b contemporary gallery in Hamilton, Ontario.

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Artist & Curator’s Talk

by Susan Schelle, Artist, and Ana Barajas, Curator
McMaster Museum of Art
Wednesday, March 7, 12:30 – 1:20 pm

Presented as a complement to the exhibition Susan Schelle: Selected Works on view in the Museum’s entrance level Sherman Gallery until March 24, 2018

Admission is Free and all are welcome.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Susan Schelle was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and currently lives and works in Toronto. She was an Associate Professor Emeritus in Visual Studies, J.H. Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto. She has completed a number of public art commissions, notably salmon run at The Rogers Centre Toronto, passage at York University Toronto, and laws of nature at Court House Square Park, Toronto. She has shown both nationally and internationally including The Cenci Gallery, Rome, Italy and The Freedman Gallery Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania. Her work resides in the collections of Air Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, McMaster Museum of Art, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Vancouver Art Gallery, and The National Gallery of Canada. In addition to her own work, Schelle has collaborated with Mark Gomes on several public commissions, most recently jetstream at Terminal One, Pearson International Airport, Toronto.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Ana Barajas holds a BFA from OCAD University in Sculpture/Installation. She received a MVA, Curatorial and a MA, Modern Art History from the University of Toronto. As the Director of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, a non-profit artist-run centre, Barajas has managed more than one-hundred exhibitions to date. Independent curatorial projects include It takes everyone to know no one in 2011 at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum, University of Toronto, The 19th Holeat Cuchifritos Gallery+Project Space, NY in 2014 and the group exhibition Disappearing Act at the Thames Art Gallery, Chatham-Kent in 2017.

McMaster Museum of Art
Alvin A. Lee Building
McMaster University
1280 Main St W
Hamilton, ON L8S 4L6
905.525.9140 x.23241

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Admission is Free
Museum Hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-5pm, Thu 11-7, Sat 12-5
museum@mcmaster.ca
http://museum.mcmaster.ca

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Waking the Magicians, 2015
In addition to his solo exhibition at the Museum this summer, Artist/Curator Brad Isaacs has selected two works from McMaster’s collection―one by Carl Beam and the other by Richard Long―for the installation in the adjacent gallery. The works are intended to renew questions about land, place, relationships to nature in an art historical context, and the space for indigenous art within the broader contemporary art world.  His title for the installation, Waking the Magicians, is a reference to the controversial juxtaposition of works by Richard Long and the Yuendumu language group (Northern Territories), Australia in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou curated by Jean-Hubert Martin. Waking the Magicians continues until August 15, 2015.

Magiciens de la Terre, 1989
“An exhibition loved and hated in equal measure, Martin curated the show to address the fact that there were, as he put it, “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth.” He attempted to engage critically with certain aspects of neo-colonial mentality in the West, particularly a resurgent interest in ‘primitivism,’ which Martin felt aestheticized exotic cultures without destablilizing western definitions of fine art, modernism, or identity. The exhibition included works by 100 artists (50 from the so called ‘West’ and 50 from the ‘margins’), attempting to show all on equal footing.” ¹

For the 1989 exhibition, Richard Long’s Red Earth Circle was installed beside Yuendumu community’s Yam Dreaming. On this juxtaposition, art historians Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson wrote:
“The sand painting…in front of [Long] left you with the feeling that here were two artists from extraordinarily different places trying to reproduce the elements of the world. But for Long, the elements are base materials themselves, and for the Australian Aboriginal painting, they’re visible signs of the hidden world.” 2

Here is a video of the Yuendumu community installing their work in Magiciens de la Terre

Magiciens de la Terre, 1989 (7′ 50″ clip) from Marco di Castri on Vimeo.

And here is Richard Long installing his work in Magiciens de la Terre

¹ “Magiciens De La Terre.” FORMER WEST“. BAK, n.d. Web. 20 May 2015. <http://www.formerwest.org/ResearchLibrary/MagiciensdelaTerre>.

^{2  “CONSTRUCTING THE SPECTACLE OF CULTURE IN MUSEUMS” Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson
This text is drawn from the lecture series ‘Art in context: rethinking the New World,’ sponsored in the Fall
of 1992 by the Atlanta College of Art Gallery and Continuing Education Department. It was originally
published in Artpapers, 17:3 (May–June 1993), pp. 2–9.
http://www.jinavalentine.com/archiving/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Wilson-Karp-Museums.pdf}

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