Media Release
For immediate
release
September 14, 2006
Walter Phillips Gallery turns World Upside Down
World Upside Down
September 30, 2006 to March 3, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 30, 2 – 4 p.m.
Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Information: 403.762.6281
Imagine a world in which Superman is a Soviet hero, killer rabbits hunt humans, and British aristocrats dressed in “African” fabrics lose their heads. Welcome to World Upside Down, opening September 30 at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre.
“The world upside down is one in which the symbolic order is turned on its head,” says exhibition curator Richard Hill. “As an artistic strategy, symbolic inversion illuminates and challenges the visual conventions that police social hierarchies. When power relations are suddenly turned on their head, we recognize that some behaviours that we take to be natural and necessary are merely conventional.”
In Yinka Shonibare’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads, the artist has restaged Gainsborough’s famous painted portrait as a sculpture, but has decapitated the sitters, removed the landscape, and dressed the subjects in colourful “African” fabrics that themselves have complex colonial histories.
World Upside Down also draws from pop culture, examining the symbolic inversion of films such as Planet of the Apes and the killer rabbits in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The exhibition also features the DC comic Superman: Red Son, written by Mark Millar. Red Son posits an alternate comic book reality in which the infant Superman’s rocket lands in the USSR and Superman grows up on a collective farm in the Ukraine. In the Shadow of No Towers, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman contemplates how Bush’s America seems to have turned itself upside down in response to the calamity of the September 11th attacks.
World Upside Down will also extend into public spaces to include a commissioned billboard project by Terrance Houle and Jarusha Brown at 16th Avenue and 73rd Street NW in Calgary. The billboard, which will be in place from September 23 to October 23, parodies the complexities of contemporary Aboriginal identity. Houle depicts himself shopping for groceries, working at the office, and performing other mundane daily tasks dressed in full powwow regalia, highlighting the perceived, but far from actual, schism between traditional Indigenous identity and contemporary life.
Artists featured in World Upside Down include Ahmoo Angeconeb, Lori Blondeau, T.C. Cannon, Renée Cox, Jack Daws, Rosalie Favell, General Idea, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Terrance Houle and Jarusha Brown, Goyce Kakegamic, Jim Logan, Shelley Niro, Roger Shimomura, and Yinka Shonibare.
World Upside Down opens with artists’ talks by Renée Cox and Terrance Houle on Thursday, September 28, 7 p.m., a tour of the exhibition with the artists and curator at 2 p.m. on Saturday, September 30, followed by the opening reception from 2 to 4 p.m.
View low-res images from World Upside Down available for media use.
To obtain high resolution images, contact jill_sawyer@banffcentre.ca • 403.762.6475
Media Contact
Jill Sawyer
Media and Communications Officer, The Banff Centre
403.762.6475