Works from the Horse of Oblivion series

Horse of Oblivion 2, 2019
On view from March 18 – July 18, 2022

Horse of Oblivion 5, 2019
On view from July 22 – November 21, 2022

Horse of Oblivion 8, 2019
On view from November 25, 2022 – March 10, 2023

Shannon Bool’s practice, which spans painting, sculpture, installation, photograms, and carpets and tapestries, marries fine art with methods traditionally relegated to craft or the decorative arts, often associated with female labour. Her work considers the system of art history while simultaneously engaging and referencing related disciplines such as architecture, literature, and psychology to question our habitual ways of seeing.

In the Horses of Oblivion series, the artist combines images of modernist and brutalist architecture with elegant, energetic horses in stride. Bool was inspired by an image by Carlo Mollino, an Italian modernist architect, designer, and photographer who designed the Equestrian Club of Turin. Mollino’s work is a photomontage of a horse running past the façade of the Equestrian Club. In reference to that image, as well as Mollino’s surrealist treatment of the body in his designs, Bool developed this series by collaging buildings – including those by Jean Renaudie and Aldo Rossi – onto the bodies of horses to signify the power and progress modernism was intended to proclaim and evoke. Here, horses symbolize beauty, speed, and power but also act as harbingers of things to come.

These works were originally created as photograms, a technique where photographic prints are created without the use of a camera through directly exposing light-sensitive paper. For this series, Bool made collages with transparent foils that were then placed atop photographic paper and exposed to light. Blown up on a grand scale as billboards, the images expose the method of their creation, making visible the gaps and tape that hold the layers together.

The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.