Simply Curious
"Simply Curious" by Laurel MacMillan, Spring 2007, pp. 110-12
Provocative curation can make an exhibition. The opening wall of “Simply Curious,” a group show organized by gallery partner Martin Shopland, presented a seemingly abstract oil painting in a muted palette of ochres and dark reds by François Xavier Saint-Pierre, flanked by two bronze sculptures of male slaves on pedestals, their black-patinated bodies writhing and twisting against their shackles and away from the painting. It was a curious but somehow suitable pairing that became even more interesting when one learned that the contemporary painting actually depicted the reflection of a ship’s mast in water and that the slaves (ca. late 18th century) were galley slaves modelled after figures found on a monument to Ferdinando II de’ Medici in the Tuscan port city of Livorno.
This connective approach continued throughout the exhibition of 21 handcrafted objects, drawings and photographs. Each one was accompanied by its provenance and a concise description. The relatively small scale of the one-room exhibition lent it an intimacy that magnified the resonances among the objects.
The theme of water continued: a black-and-white photograph by Lux Feininger showed rainwater collecting on the roof of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, a pre–First World War etching depicted the wet ground of The Mall in London reflecting men in formation. Reflections could also be found in three late 19th-century photographs: a double portrait produced from two negatives and a pair of double self-portraits. The theme of water was countered and complemented by references to earth and land: a Zulu earthenware drinking vessel (ca. 1920), an Iroquois chief ’s stick carved with intertwining serpents and a late 19th-century Welsh shepherd’s crook. The curve of the crook found echoes in the elegantly furled plants of a Karl Blossfeldt photogravure and in the serpent-like form of a German wrought-iron chimney hook.
The inclusion of the metal work called to mind the 20th-century American collector Albert C. Barnes and the idiosyncratic way in which he installed his collection. Correspondences among the artifacts were numerous. In a written statement, Shopland identified curiosity as the origin of collecting. Without the constraint of a single theme, viewers were invited into a format of open-ended speculation.
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