Francis McWhannell Writer and curator

x (life, still. Baby)

John Ward Knox

x (life, still. Baby) is one of a small number of similar works that composed John Ward Knox’s 2010 exhibition welcome home sun (Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland). Likened by the artist to cover versions of songs, the pieces in the show were ostensibly based on photographs – some images of famous sculptures, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina (1621–2), which became Ward Knox’s x (still, life. Hold); others famous in their own right, like Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Broadway at Night (1913), which became x (life, still. Street). x (life, still. Baby) derives from pioneering photographic artist Julia Margaret Cameron’s Prayer and Praise (1865), a moody image generally understood to refer to the Holy Family. …

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Continue reading via Bowerbank Ninow, where this essay is titled ‘welcome home sun’.

Francis McWhannell Writer and curator

About

Francis McWhannell (b. 1985, Aotearoa New Zealand) is a writer and curator based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He is curator of the Fletcher Trust Collection, a major private collection of Aotearoa art founded in 1962.