Turner Prize* - Golden Jubilee

In celebration of the Dunlop Art Gallery's 50th Anniversary, artist's collective Turner Prize* presented "Golden Jubilee," a large scale installation masquerading as a historical retrospective. The artists recreated exhibitions from each decade of the Dunlop's history, creating "covers" of works by Douglas Morton, Douglas Bentham, Tomiyo Sasaki, Leesa Streifler, Charles Rea, and Terrance Houle. Turner Prize*s strategies for inhabiting these noteworthy Canadian artist's works are sassy, distinctive, and diverse - Golden Jubilee sees the artists casually deconstructing a Douglas Morton painting into is component parts, dressing as salmon to recreate Tomiyo Sasaki's 1986 video installation, Spawning Sockeyes, and appropriating the form and style of Leesa Streifler's grimly funny Giant series to create an unholy trinity of oversized nude self-portraits overlaid with dark auras and symbols derived from ritual magick practices.

This body of work reflects upon the Dunlop Art Gallery's first fifty years while avoiding the sentimental yet authoritative tone typical of anniversary celebrations. Instead it is an acknowledgement of the perversion of history that occurs in any archive, productively addressing the slippage of time and the failure of language to accurately convey the complexity of past experience. As unreliable narrators, the members of Turner Prize* combine archival research, first and second-hand recollections, new technologies, daydreams, and inside jokes to reimagine the Dunlop's history through an esoteric, witty, and highly suspect lens.