Theatrum Mundi: The 1997 Marion McCain Atlantic Art Exhibition

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of Women’s Studies at the
University if Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Susan Gibson Garvey, curator of Theatrum Mundi, presents a bilingual
catalogue of contemporary art by 25 artists of the Atlantic region. Her
introductory essay is learned and comprehensive, contextualizing the
works presented within postmodernism and yet acknowledging their
cultural and gender categories. This exhibition was 10 years in the
making and owes much to the generous patronage of the late Marion
McCain.

Not all these artists are native to the Atlantic Provinces, but all are
current residents. Garvey has chosen to pursue depth rather than breadth
and in doing so has assembled a pleasing variety of art practices from
mixed-media installations and reworked folk traditions to aboriginal
sculpture.

Garvey explains that the term “theatrum mundi” refers to 16th- and
17th-century collections of objects, precursors of modern museums.
Whether one translates the term as “theatre of the world” or, as is
more common, “cabinet of the world,” the suggestion of a gathering
of works marked as much by their differences as their similarities,
rests easily on this exhibition and catalogue. The idea of the
“cabinet” is captured ironically and wittily in some of the works
themselves, such as Alex Livingston’s “Wild Things 1996–97,” an
installation of 13 paintings in oil on canvas, that movingly suggests
the collections of our ancestors; or Carl Zimmerman’s installation,
“Display Cases and Photocopies,” that literally transforms museum
display cases into art.

The work of women artists is particularly interesting in this
collection. Newfoundland’s Kathleen Knowling’s four hooked mats,
“Cod is 1995–97,” both valorizes the folk-art mat-making of
outport women, as its content comments on the decline of the northern
cod stocks on which this society has rested for centuries. Sarah
Maloney’s installation of found art associated with the private sphere
(i.e., gloves, shoetrees, a sleeve board) playfully suggests the
domestic labor of women’s lives even as its dark tone recalls the
drudgery imposed on generations of women.

Among the works of aboriginal artists represented, Edward Ned A.
Bear’s polished masks are particularly haunting in their beauty and
power.