SHIRLEY BROWN, "Vestiges," May 28 - June 30, 2007, Art Gallery of Swift Current

Art Gallery of Swift Current

May 28 - June 30, 2007

By Jack Anderson

As the title to Shirley Brown’s extensively traveled exhibition, Vestiges, might suggest, this installation, originated at Brandon’s Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, imagines a museum display of what is itself an imagined civilization. Responding to 29 bird skeletons she found in an old cook stove on her family’s abandoned homestead in Manitoba, Brown offers us material traces and invented remains here — ‘artifacts’ such as shrines and reliquaries — that in sum coalesce into a picture of a lost fictional culture and its belief systems. While poetically pointing to cultural memory and our commemoration of the past, these elegant but somewhat creepy fragments more critically inquire into the way in which we hold and shape history. Adopting museological practices and strategies, Brown displays her fantasy relics within vitrines, locating, ordering and labeling them systematically via taxonomic protocols. She also writes didactic information panels contextualizing and explaining her ‘finds’. Forcing plausibility from the implausible, Brown confronts scientific evidentiary claims to truth, dispatching both logic and objectivity. The viewer comes to understand that not only are museums physical sites but ideological edifices built on and maintaining society’s normative values and its claims to reality — exposing the provisional nature of our personal and cultural memories.