Dept. of culture

gathering for the hunt

October 7, 2008  1:49 pm

Now that antlers, taxidermied animals, and bear skins are verging on the ubiquitous, you have to work a little harder to keep your game up in the dead game stakes. Which is just one reason to check out Hunting!, the new exhibit at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery. On display are works by seven artists who explore contemporary society’s distance from our hunter/gatherer past. In pride of place are photographs from William Notman’s “Moose Hunting” series. Notman, who was the “Photographer to the Queen” under Victoria, created testaments to the glories of Canadian wild life that are as central to that country’s mythology as the Hudson River School is to the States. Resonating with a similar spirit are Richard Harrington’s early-forties black-and-white photographs of Inuit families hunting seal and other quarry. And the quest for a different type of flesh is examined in Terence Koh’s photos of a beautiful blond boy accessorizing his nakedness with antler-shaped branches.

tags: Stephen Bulger Gallery, taxidermy

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