Thorneycroft at AGSM
Diana Thorneycroft “Black Forest (dark waters)” at Art Gallery of Soutwestern Manitoba
June 28 – August 24, 2018
Opening Reception: June 28, 7:30PM
Lunch and Look Artist-led Tour: June 29, 12:00PM
This exhibition brings together Diana Thorneycroft’s two most recent bodies of work, Herd and Black Forest (dark waters). Consisting of more than a hundred toy horses galloping up a ramp into the gallery wall, Herd marks a new visual vocabulary for Thorneycroft. While the familiar shapes and the stiff action poses remain for some of the classic plastic horses, others are disfigured and morphed: melted, mangled, and altered with prosthetics, pieces of wood, nails, badger claws, bones, hair, and teeth. These horses appear at once vulnerable and powerful, tamed and wild. Meanwhile, the adjoining series of photographs and architectural structures in Black Forest (dark waters) explore the relationship between horses and the humanoid keepers of their herd. The horses, herdsmen, and their interactions exist in the realm of the uncanny and the grotesque; informed by fairy tales and mythology, the Black Forest is a dangerous place that provides the stage for intersecting dynamics of power, violence, ritual, desire, and care.