ISBN: 978-1-894773-28-7 176 pages, hardcover 21 b/w, 43 colour photographs 19 x 28.5 cm $29.99

The World Upside Down

Edited by Richard William Hill Essays by Richard William Hill, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Joseph Nayhowtow Coproduced with Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Quebec

This catalogue accompanies World Upside Down, an exhibition curated by Richard William Hill that originated at the Walter Phillips Gallery in September 2006. The catalogue surveys the strategy of “symbolic inversion” used by contemporary artists, while also providing historical context on Western and Indigenous North American traditions of inversion. As an artistic strategy, inversion has the potential to illuminate and challenge the visual conventions that police social hierarchies, making power relations explicit. The world upside down is one in which the symbolic order is turned on its head. It is a world visualized by artists where rabbits hunt humans and Superman is a hero of the Soviet Union. It is the Planet of the Apes and a planet where British aristocrats lose their heads when dressed in African fabrics. In each inversion an artist has turned a hierarchical dichotomy upside down, but in most cases the dichotomy itself doesn’t survive the trip. It breaks down under the strain of its own absurdity and for a moment we are liberated from its tyranny.