Art Gallery of Windsor sinks teeth into pop culture display
The Art Gallery of Windsor is about to pop.
Running until Oct. 1, the place will explode with pop art, pop culture and a general pop sensibility. Expect bright colours, zany approaches, and a critique of contemporary consumer society but — in the tradition of all good pop art — with a twist. In the AGW’s case, the theme is food. Specifically, sandwich, or perhaps, Sandwich.
To celebrate Windsor’s 125th birthday, The Sandwich Project provides six exhibits, all loosely connected to the Town of Sandwich or the sandwich that you eat.
“The whole Sandwich Project emerged from the idea that it is Windsor’s 125th anniversary and we wanted to have a project that talked about this place,” AGW director Catharine Mastin said. “And Sandwich, Ont., which amalgamated with Windsor in 1935, provides an opportunity for us to play with the many meanings of sandwich: sandwich as object, sandwich as place, sandwich as experience.”
The brainchild of The Sandwich
Project was Windsor-based conceptual artist Iain Baxter&. So the show includes Baxter & Food, Polaroid pics of edibles he shot some 30 years ago.
There’s also a third-floor exhibit of the AGW’s newly acquired works of pop artist Charles Pachter, dating to his time at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills — including a portrait of Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood, whose folios from the Journals of Susanna Moodie are also on display.
Don’t attend the AGW show hungry. Munchies are not actually served, except as food for thought.
“There are various politics at the root of a lot of the work, but there’s humour, fun, bright colours,” said Jaclyn Meloche, AGW curator of contemporary art. “Food is an incredibly complex subject matter, in that everybody eats and everybody has a relationship with food, albeit in different ways.”