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Dec 15 - Dec 22,2002 |
All Canadian and All Women at the McMichael
North Toronto gallery showcases groundbreaking exhibition of female artists in Perspectives: Canadian Women Artists
By Jennifer Febbraro
Originally Published: 2002-12-01
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Work by Helen McNicoll
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Toronto, no, Canada needs its own guerrilla tribe. Remember the old Guerrilla Girls poster that read: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 5 percent of artists in the modern art section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female."
Back in the day, when these riotous femmes, often diabolically named the gender police of New York's art scene were asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund in New York, they conducted a "weenie count" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results, they found, were more than a little "revealing."
While their poster was rejected on the grounds of its message not being clear enough (!), the "girls" took out a lease on local buses and transported it à la carte to communities everywhere. But what of women painters or artists in general, now two decades later?
The McMichael is trying to solve that query without merely looking to the dead for evidence. There are still some of us walking around in the flesh, and you can meet a few at the opening of Perspectives: Canadian Women Artists whose cocktail party, two weeks from now, will be hosted by "Queen Rat" herself - contemporary poet and journalist - Lynn Crosbie.
Crosbie was also responsible for selecting video, poetry and literary excerpts that appear throughout the exhibition as it links central preoccupations and stylistic concerns through three thematic categories: Private Worlds, Land and Place, and Changing Paths.
For a moment, the spotlight will be lifted off of Canada's all-male group of artists, the omnipresent Group of Seven who were knighted as the spokesmen for nationalist vision in our country and abroad. Surprise! Scientists have recently discovered after years of scavenging, that the artwork created by women also provides a different narrative dimension, perhaps, dare I say it, equally significant to our understanding of Canadiana.
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