" Wonderland " at Museum London

Friday, 23 June 2006 11:41

LONDON - This exhibition of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing features work by artists who explore the themes of theatre and spectacle through a series of works enthralled with the superficial.  Opening on June 30 at Museum London, Wonderland includes work by Heather Meek (Windsor, ON); Alison Norlen (Saskatoon, SK); Dianne Pearce (St. Thomas, ON/Mexico City, MX); Max Streicher (Toronto, ON) and Aidan Urquhart (London, ON)...

Max Streicher’s clownish inflatable characters Hamm and Clov are enchanting and fantastic.  Like familiar parade balloons abandoned at ground level their disembodied heads are imposing and unsettling, evoking a sense of astonishment and apprehension.  Parades are an equal source of inspiration for Alison Norlen’s large-scale, ink and charcoal drawings.

Originally from St. Thomas, Dianne Pearce is now based in Mexico City, where punched paper or plastic is a traditional element of religious celebration and political holidays that include Day of the Dead, Christmas and Independence Day.  For Better Left Unsaid, in which familiar, but potentially hurtful expressions appear in English, French and Spanish, Pearce borrows the festive form to question the exclusiveness of language.  Her incisions into the plastic sheets, cutting out harmful words as a metaphor for removing, silencing and eliminating, create a negative space so the words can no longer do harm.

Heather Meek’s collection of fictional posters entitled Not Recommended for Infants and Invalids references the world of hustlers and snake-oil salesmen promoting cure-all tonics for what ails you – curiosities that both attract and repel side-show patrons.  The characters form a patchwork of heroines possessing benign, criminal or fantastic identities which together create an alternative, celebratory and possibly fictional history.