PATRON is proud to announce Amidst Relations, the first solo exhibition of Richard Maguire’s (b.1991, Aberdeen) work in the U.S. Concerned with the histories of race and sexuality from Britain and South Asia, Maguire approaches archives as sites of both epistemic loss and abundance, dwelling in the images to consider what they communicate, and that which is veiled. Amidst Relations premieres a recent grouping of intimate graphite on paper drawings adapted from Indo-British visual sources from the last two centuries.
Amidst Relations takes as its foundation the matrix of female subjectivity within colonial structures. The roles of mother, maid, daughter, concubine, or slave become scrambled–obfuscated legacies of bodies historically unseen or erased. Selecting scenes from classic film, 19th century photographs, and prints, Maguire places emphasis on “details,”, and “acts” – fleeting moments where bodies touch, eyes lock, or physical proximity coalesces. Key here are scenes of intimacy–touch that contorts initial perceptions of the images through the imposition of another. Scale is used to focus, or attend to that which is present and that which is not–or at least not initially apparent.
For Maguire, abstraction, cropping, and scale extend an invitation to closely inspect the images, dwell within them, and evade a reliance on the “frame” of the initial source. “I think part of making drawings in this manner demands that people have to acknowledge these drawings are in fact only partial images, or question the veracity of the images.” Drawn onto found paper, notably the covers and frontispieces of The Faber Gallery of Oriental Art (originally published in 1948), the drawings testify to the realities of much larger social currents. Partial images depict partial histories when there are in fact no easy, or grand narratives. Together, the works form an ‘imperial braid’ of intertwined symbols, engagements, and contacts that suggest the role of Anglo-Indian femme people in Colonial India, through their alienation or enfoldment into the colonial project.
