'Reframing The Muse' curated by Ruth Millington featuring work by Elaine Woo MacGregor

June 10, 2024

Reframing the Muse – curated by Ruth Millington  as part of Oxford Festival of The Arts.

28 June – 14 July
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, 4pm – 7pm
Weekends, 11am – 4pm

Gallery artist Elaine Woo MacGregor, alongside eight diverse artists have been invited to create or submit work to offer a contemporary reimagining of the nine ancient muses, bringing to the fore their chosen attributes in variety of ways, from representational and iconographic to abstract. Turning tables on traditional art history, it will invite consideration of the subject’s intrinsic value and partnership with the artist who has portrayed them. The current trope will be replaced with a range of genders, races and identities seen through various gazes, including the queer and feminist.
Restoring the original power to the term muse, the exhibition will invite audiences to understand the real role of the muse as an agent of change and great source of creative inspiration, as once recognised in Ancient Greece. Underpinning the exhibition will be Ruth Millington’s research and book, ‘MUSE’ (Penguin, 2022), in which she reframes muses as active agents.

 
Pictured in her own private space, too, 90s Cantonese pop star, Faye Wong, has inspired Elaine Woo MacGregor. In her expressively painted composition ‘Urania’s Love – Shanghai Flâneuse’, the Muse of Astrology and Astronomy is a star herself, posed as if for a billboard campaign and clutching a shiny compass in one hand. 
 
“I wanted my painting to have the look and feel of a Shanghai billboard with a filmic and quirky interjection of a cat and the gentle musing expression of Faye Wong. Classical Urania’s compass or staff, and the celestial globe is replaced by an imagined Vivienne Westwood metal handbag and a school drawing compass. She is not wearing a crown of stars; she is a star herself. It a strikingly casual pose, one that many of us can relate to but the theatricality of it all reminds us that it is a staged fashion-shoot” Elaine Woo MacGregor.
 Find out more here.
Read article in FAD Magazine here.