January 8th through February 14th, 2009

Crystal Mowry’s Twilight of an Empire continued RENDER’s strategy of commissioning artists to develop new works through an informal residency program, to critically engage with the history of gallery and museum practice, and to respond to social, cultural and environmental dynamics in the Waterloo Region. This project is the result of an ongoing dialogue that will continue with Mowry producing a new work for the atrium of the UW School of Architecture.

Crystal Mowry’s Twilight of an Empire is inspired by a number of historical accounts of Ota Benga (later known as Otto Bingo), a Congolese Pygmy brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century with the purpose of being in an Anthropological display at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. But it was the month of September in 1906 when he lived among the chimps and orangutans in the Bronx Zoo that will always be the most curious part of his story. For that brief month he attracted thousands of visitors to the zoo and incited hot debates about race in America.

Twilight of an Empire is an open-back diorama comprised of essentially two versions of the same scene, separated by conflicting sight lines. There is the diorama/object version and the live video signal visible on a monitor. Neither the diorama, nor the video stream, aim to provide a factual account of the story. Rather, Mowry hopes to situate viewers somewhere between the lived event and a document.

Twilight of an Empire is a bit like a set for a film of overlapping moments in history that implicate ideas of savagery and civilization. As with her earlier works, Mowry is interested in the discrepancies between different accounts of historical events, and the room that can be created for uncertainty depending on how the event is framed. Within Twilight of an Empire is an unlikely mash-up of architectural structures: a larger Victorian Glass House (inspired in part by a 1905 image of the Atrium at the Bronx Zoo) houses a modernist “monkey house” which borrows characteristics from the architecture of Le Corbusier and a Robinson Crusoe inspired treehouse.