About the exhibition
Melbourne artist John Meade was the second artist in the Incident in the Museum series, presented by the Monash University Museum of Art. It featured new work by Meade, who had recently returned from New York, where he enjoyed twelve months research as a recipient of the prestigious Anne and Gordon Samstag Visual Arts Scholarship.

Central motifs in the work of John Meade are the metaphysical, the surreal and the erotic as manifested in sculpture, art history and public life. His work for Incident in the Museum therefore involved a trilogy of sculptural works that were choreographed within a purpose-designed light installation.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was a dramatic new work completed in New York over the previous 12 months, Black Duo: Self Portrait as Mary Magdalene, and Nude with Pitchfork, 2004, a depiction of an aberrant upright figure, accompanied by another more organic, abstract reclining motif, which takes the form of an over-scaled, monstrous section of respiratory tract.

Meade’s upright figure in the first work is based on an early Renaissance wood carving, Mary Magdalene, by Donatello. The second reclining figure, Nude with Pitchfork, also relates to the history of sculptural form and to the body, although in this case, the corporeality of Meade’s sculpture is ambiguous, a confusion of interior and exterior, and the classicism of its late-modernist reference is infected by the uncanny and the surreal.

Donatello’s Magdalene is noted for its expressive qualities, and for the depiction of the former prostitute as outwardly wasted and distressed, while inwardly enlightened by the transformative power of pure faith. Max Delany, who was then MUMA’s Artistic Director, suggested that, ‘like Donatello’s Mary Magdalene, Meade’s Black Duo—while all hair, formless, and irrational—is equally virtuous and expressive, supplicant yet dignified, and full of potential’.

John Meade’s playful, theatrical sculptures play with scale and expectation. Tapping into the real and the subconscious, they provoke both the mind and body of the viewer. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, writer Johanna Fahey identified the way in which Meade’s work has the ability to take one’s breath away.

As Delany suggests: ‘In this sense, Meade’s work is traumatic (focussed on vulnerability of the body), psychological and sensual (about knowing and feeling), and restorative (giving new breath, and designed to renew spirit and hope)’.

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^{Image: John Meade, Self Portrait as Mary Magdalene, 2004}