An early acquisition featured in Roll Out: Henry Sandham, Sketch for Portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald, 1889, oil over steel engraving on canvas (00-046). Photo credit: Larry Ostrom
Exhibitions
Roll Out
Contemporary Feature Gallery
10 January - 11 February 2007
On the occasion of the Art Centre's 50th anniversary, we offered a special exhibition to launch a yearlong series of extraordinary projects. Roll Out was, in essence, a performance in the form of a continuously changing display of works from the Art Centre's collection. Beginning with the first piece acquired, works were hung in the order in which they entered our holdings. A special installation team was active throughout the run of the show, removing works as the space fills and replacing them with successive acquisitions to produce a staged chronology.
Roll Out re-enacted our founding era as the realization of Agnes Etherington's vision of a museum-quality collection of art for the enjoyment and instruction of the Kingston and Queen's communities. In offering this chronology - a form of time travel through the gallery's early years - we encouraged repeat visits to view new configurations of the display. Contrary to the normal curatorial practice of the calculated orchestration of aesthetics and themes, the curatorial premise of Roll Out mapped one material process - acquisition - onto another - display. And, as with our collection-building, there was no definitive termination point. The exhibition was experimental, its goal experiential.
Inspired by German curator and theorist Michael Fehr's ReVision (1988) and his understanding of the museum as reservoir of community memory, Roll Out's scroll through the Art Centre collection acted as a mnemonic prompt for the times, personalities and politics of the formative years of the gallery's existence. The gallery's first year of collecting was marked by a transfer of university holdings, a wide array of objects including many portraits, ethnographic material and Inuit ivories. Roll Out afforded an exceptional chance to view aborigine shields and delicately incised walrus tusks alongside rare prints and paintings. As a further window into our formative years, a complete listing of Art Centre exhibitions for the years 1957 to 1991 augmented the presentation of the collection.
In conjunction with this exhibition, a special program, Roll Out, Roll On, was presented on Sunday 28 January, 2 - 4 pm.
Jan Allen
Research assistance in the preparation of Roll Out was provided by Tabitha Minns and Heather Savage through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Institutions program. We acknowledge the presentation and programming support of the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.