8. Women and Their Work, Margaret Meehan Hystrionics and the Forgotten Arm

In this exhibition, Meehan wove a dense tale into her objects, photographs, and installations. But beyond the back stories (see: Victorian Pugilism, boxing, The Circassian beauties, and medical anomalies), I don’t think I saw a more elegantly installed exhibition all year. And that’s saying a lot, considering the gallery at Women and Their Work often feels stilted and constricting. Meehan essentially created a dramatic stage-set for both her works and the story she was longing to tell. Many Thanks to Katie Geha’s on Glasstire.com for including me in an amazing list of artists.

There is a figure in the history of the circus side-show who embodied the freak and the familiar and is often overlooked. Supposedly saved from a life of sexual slavery in the Harems of Turkish nobility by entrepreneurial showbiz men like P.T. Barnum, the Circassian beauties were said to be the most beautiful women in the world. With an exotic sounding name and hair teased high in an afro-like halo, the Circassian beauty’s alabaster skin reflected both a familiar and idealized beauty to bourgeois Victorian audiences as well as an otherized specter on which to lay their fantasies and sympathies.

Margaret Meehan digs deep into the registers of 19th century history for facts and mythologies to explore, explode and reassemble. Her work often investigates the quality of viewership, what it means to be a spectator—a gawker, a consumer of art and entertainment. In Hystrionics and the Forgotten Arm, on view at Women and Their Work, Meehan applies the metaphoric structure of the boxing ring to the tale of the Circassian beauty evoking a theater of structured violence by which exploitation and atrocity is made entertainment. Read More…

There is something not right about the first picture. A model in a snow-white gown is staring straight at you, into the camera. It’s fairly serene. But she has a white beard, actually more of a mane, linking forehead to chest, as if she hopped out of Narnia to warn you about the nefarious queen.

But below, out of focus, you realize that she is also wearing white boxing gloves. This is where “The Pugilist” comes in. Read more…

Upcoming solo exhibition at

Women & Their Work Gallery

 Austin, Texas

October 6 – November 10, 2011

“Margaret Meehan offers her own reclaimed object spoof as well, though these have word play far removed from Mr. Green’s high-brow, dorm room humor. Ms. Meehan, like many of her artist colleagues here, is playing with words. By wrapping thin, branched twigs in soft pink or black leather, binding them with beads and colored thread and calling them all Libido (with various numeral assignations) she’s turned fragile little fallen branches into S and M personas, cladding something utterly benign in an armor of identities and suggestive forces. The sticks, fastened deftly to the wall to appear to grow out of it, cast shadows three layers thick around themselves, increasing their thrust, shall we say, and making them seem more beautiful, but more terrifying too. A small white fur and plaster bust beneath the branches called The Pugilist opens a toothy slit of a mouth and drops a tear from a hollow, beady eye. It’s a beaten creature.” READ MORE.

Opening April 30, 2011:6-8pm through June 4, 2011 at Centraltrak, Dallas

Including Texas artists Nick Barbee, Katrina Moorehead, Faith Gay, Sterling Allen, Charles Hancock, Lance Letscher, Tom Sale, Camp…, William S. Burroughs, Dan Phillips, Margaret Meehan, William Gaynor, Joshua Saunders, Alexandre Rosa, Taro-kun, and Leon Allesi. Curated by Heyd Fontenot (of the naked people portraits).  This should be a good one. Participating in the 2011 Texas Biennial.