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A Feminist Arcadian Landscape by Dr. Cynthia Hammond

The Later Work of Joyce Wieland

Peer-reviewed article by Dr. Cynthia Hammond

For a special issue of  The Journal of Canadian Art History, co-edited by Johanne Sloan and Mark Clintberg. Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d'histoire de l'art Canadien, vol. 41, no.1/2  (2020): 71-97.

Joyce Wieland, She Will Remain in the Phenomenal World Filled with Ignorance With Her Sheep, and Not Go With Him (oil on canvas, 1983, 10 x 15”), collection of the AGO.

Towards the end of her prolific career, Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s paintings and drawings occasioned substantial criticism for their perceived aesthetic failures, with the result that these works have never been given full consideration as part of her lifelong feminist project. In this essay, Hammond argues that these works radically anticipate a subsequent generation’s fascination with interspecies vitality and the feminist concept of “becoming”. She situates these later works in relation to a little-known creative project: "Beaver Lodge", the last house that Wieland owned in Toronto. Hammond brings Wieland's transformation of this house into dialogue with the artist's later paintings and drawings, and argues that Beaver Lodge represents a high point in Wieland’s cumulative, feminist, Arcadian vision.




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