Minshall-Miscellany - Y Art Gallery

The Bird in the Gilded Cage
Design for Jaycee’s Carnival Queen costume
Acrylic on paper
12.75” x 19.5”
in this exhibition, MINSHALL MISCELLANY,
provide a rich sampling of that variety.
The range is wide, but the works are
not disparate. There is a complex web of
interrelatedness. To borrow from the theme
of his 1997 mas, each piece is a thread of the
overall Tapestry of the Minshall body of work.
Recurrent themes reveal themselves
across the many media and art forms: duality,
life and death, good and evil, humankind’s
glorious perfection and man’s inhumanity to
man. The quintessence of celebration and
the mad dance on the brink of oblivion. The
dramatic arc of the carnival, beginning with the
birth of jouvay, rising out of the earth, to the
fully-fledged glory of Carnival Tuesday, waning
to the lengthening shadows of las’ lap.
The theatre designs have the vitality
of the mas. Sculpture is in the form of the
transformative masque. A mural dances like a
mas in the breeze. Painting and collage deploy
the meticulous intricacy of headpiece and
breastplate. The mas is theatre of the street.
And from the surface of drawing and painting,
collage and maquette, we are caught in the
sidelong gaze of that serene and surreal man
of the carnival, our Callaloo, our Everyman.
– Todd Gulick, (11 Oct 2012)
4 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 5