When I walked into her show at Women and their Work right after it opened weeks ago, and this is the last weekend you can catch it, by the way, I went all stupid. It’s a museum-grade show in an unexpected place, for free, with no docents or guards hanging over you. I was praying I would like it, of course, but what happened was this: I went into a kind of Beavis and Butthead brain-fog trance, which I only do in the face of really, really good work. Read more of the Glasstire review…
Might Be Good review of Hystrionics…
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…
Austin 360: New Exhibit Examines Outsider Status
By Luke Quinton
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
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…
Glasstires 2011 Fall Preview
Margaret Meehan: Hystrionics and the Forgotten Arm
Women and Their Work
October 6 – November 10, 2011
- Artist (and Glasstire blogger) Margaret Meehan self-describes her aesthetic influences as drawn from pugilism, Victoriana and the photo portraiture style of 19th c. cabinet cards. When I first saw this image, I was drawn into the enigmatic narrative. Initially reminded of Matthew Barney, upon looking longer and harder, there’s a specifically female appeal to rage and loss and endurance. This pugilist is a new, haunting archetype mixed from some heavy disparate elements. On her website, Meehan thanks the model, Amy Revier, “for her patience and exquisite loveliness throughout a very long and uncomfortable shoot.”
This acts as a description of the underlying story, for me, as well; something grotesquely lovely wrought from scary variables. Her work brings to mind the recent discovery that for people with any European ancestry, there’s a likelihood of carrying some Neanderthal DNA. Meehan’s pugilist recalls the oh-so-human, not-so-human enigma of this revelation; we’re more than we thought we ever were, and consequently must think more of the Other than we generally have — the trappings of being human just got weirder, richer and more mysterious. — Sarah Fisch Glasstire.com
