3 Summer Exhibitions
Peter Edlund
Yinka Shonibare • Josiah McElheny • Francis Cape
Monica Bock
Through September 10, 2000
Peter Edlund
Peter Edlund
Josiah McElheny
Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare, Francis Cape
Monica Bock
Monica Bock
Hadrian Piggot
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Majestic America • Peter Edlund
 In his current series, Majestic America, Edlund has adapted works from the Hudson River School of painting. To these grand landscapes painted to scale, and made contemporary by the use of colors such as lime green, blood red and cadmium orange, he has added visual narratives to discuss the abject brutality and injustice of the 19th century America.
Painted in the meticulous style of the originals, Edlund uses a 19th century painting technique to discuss the inherent lie in American Romantic painting as well as in the concept of Manifest Destiny. Edlund states that the original paintings were themselves a romantic revision of a landscape that actually never existed. He has created these scenes of cruelty and degradation as a re-revision, or rather a truth-telling, especially in connection to the African- and Native-American experiences.
These new paintings are adapted from the Hudson River collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum. They are exhibited in a collaborative project with Real Art Ways and the Wadsworth Atheneum
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Exhibition Room
Exhibition Room is a three-person show featuring the work of Francis Cape, Josiah McElheny and Yinka Shonibare. At first, the space resembles an encyclopedic museum, with artifacts from the past presented in an objective manner.
• Francis Cape
The cabinets of Francis Cape suggest paneling taken from an English Row house, Josiah McElheny’s glass objects allude to antiques or relics, and Yinka Shonibare’s works appear to be from Victorian times.
• Josiah McElheny
But each object has been created in contemporary times as a work of art that blurs the distinctions between the decorative and fine arts, gallery and domestic spaces, past and present, and the familiar and strange. The functions usually associated with cabinets, glassware and apparel have been removed, causing us to look at the items from a new perspective.
• Yinka Shonibare
In this way, the artists in Exhibition Room have used traditional decorative forms and meticulous hand-craftsmanship as a vernacular to create visually stimulating, meaning-intensive, contemporary works of art.
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Don't Forget the Lunches... • Monica Bock
 Inspired by the daily ritual of exposing one’s children and one’s nurturing skills to public scrutiny, this piece will consist of nearly 400 lead sheet bags embossed with school and day camp lunch menus packed for two young children in the course of a year. The lead bags gather in one half of a space, spreading across the floor in the order the original lunches were prepared. As fragile counter-parts to the protective yet poisonous lead bags, an equal number of cast glycerin bags accumulate on the floor in the other half of the space. On the walls hand written text by poet collaborator Zofia Burr explores the meanings of such nurturing, both what is given and when it is withheld.
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