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The Death of General Wolfe

Benjamin West
The Death of General Wolfe (Detail), 1770
oil on canvas
152.6 x 214.5 cm
Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921 (Gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, England, 1918)
National Gallery of Canada (no. 8007)

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Exhibitions

Christine Davis: Tlön

24 Jan 2004 - 25 Apr 2004

The slide installation Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, by Toronto artist Christine Davis, recreates the science-fiction world imagined by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges in his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. On Borges' shadowy planet Tlön, a secret society toils to control every detail of life. It is a cautionary tale against a highly ordered, highly regulated world that destroys other legitimate forms of experience and knowledge. Davis' stunning visual interpretation of this story casts slides of stars and interstellar clouds onto a grid of brilliant blue Morpho butterflies. Light and colour shift and change; butterflies merge with celestial events. The effect of Davis' spectacular vision is both hypnotic and hallucinatory, a meditation on the appeal – and the absurdity – of order in the universe.