Staged Meaning/Meaning Staged @ USC Fisher Museum of Art, Jan 22 – April 13, 2019

Thesaurus for Ceasing War, three embroidered silk panels with a 12-part poem completed in 2009, is being exhibited in Staged Meaning/Meaning Staged: Landscapes from the the USC Fisher Museum of Art’s permanent collection through mid-April, 2019. Other artists in the exhibition include Jan Brueghel the Elder, Mary Weatherford, and Carlos Almaraz. From the press release:

“To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Elizabeth Holmes Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art is pleased to present Staged Meaning/Meaning Staged. This exhibition features selections of Old Master and Contemporary landscapes from Fisher’s permanent collection. Through the prism of landscapes, these artworks collectively examine visual and ideological shifts in pictorial meaning.

“Each artwork embodies the aesthetic and pedagogic trends of its original historical context. As an aggregate, the works reflect changing approaches to representing and interpreting art and societal values. Staged Meaning surveys how the Old Master artists in Fisher’s permanent collection utilized landscape imagery to stage meaning prescribed by religion, history, allegory, and nationalist or expansionist ideology. The second part of the exhibition, Meaning Staged, adopts the concept of using landscapes as a vehicle for deriving individualized meaning, removed from the requirements of these historical contexts. Contemporary artists have initiated a shift by endowing the viewer with greater interpretive agency. That is, giving the viewer an opportunity to collaborate with the artist and partake in meaning-making, unburdened by conventions of the past.”

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