Pills

May 26 – June 20, 1998
Exhibition

About the Program

In Pills, Colleen Wolstenholme exhibits ivory-white plaster and golden bronze enlargements of anti-depressant pills. These objects are well-crafted, refined, elegantly streamlined and almost Egyptiform, precisely engraved with the hieroglyphic of a pharmaceutical corporate logo, objects with other-worldly names like Prozac, Paxil, and Xanax. Wolstenholme's work, for all its detached historicism and complex humour is no less powerful as an indictment of the destructive and profitable collaboration between corporate pharmaceutical firms and modern "surgical" psychiatry. These silent pills are memorials to the victims of depression and its treatment, post-Prozac bodies. As autobiography—Wolstenholme being a former victim of the abuse of prescription drugs)—this sculpture is the product of a very real healing process, the labour intensive act of making a sculpture. There is much care taken in making of this work, the care of busy and sensual, if no longer loving, hands. This exhibition is the first in a New Sculpture Series guest curated by Robin Peck.

Curator

Robin Peck

Artist

Colleen Wolstenholme

Identifier

1998.0526 PIL

Collection

grunt gallery Programming Archive

Location

grunt gallery (second location)
116-350 E. 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 4R8
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations

In copyright. For uses beyond Fair Dealing, research requests, corrections, takedown requests, or other inquiries, please contact grunt gallery: archives@grunt.ca