Hystrionics and the Forgotten Arm brochures have officially arrived at Women & Their Work. The essay was written by the amazing Andy Campbell! Swing by and pick one up today!
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Top 10 list by Katie Geha!
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.
Pastelegram review- Claudia Zapata
“Part back alley brawl and Victorian-infused spectacle, Margaret Meehan’s Hystrionics and the Forgotten Arm touches upon identity, observation and performance. Appropriating the vocabulary and aesthetics of pugilism, Meehan unveils a multimedia sensorial experience using photographs, mixed media works, sculpture-based installations and sound.” Read More on Pastelegram.
The wordless rewards at the end of Over, Under and Through: Margaret Meehan at Women and Their Work
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…