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Andrew Hunter: Peake’s Folly

For his latest collection-based installation and publication project, Dundas, Ontario artist, writer and independent curator Andrew Hunter follows the trail of James Peake Jr. from the pinnacle of Canadian society to the lonely depths of isolation and despair. The installation is a poetic meditation on the dramatic fall of a late 19th century gentleman whose high Victorian extravagances exhausted a family fortune in the Maritimes and sent him wandering to Canada’s West Coast where
he would die alone and penniless.

Using works from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s permanent collection, documentary images, artifacts and elements constructed in collaboration with his father William, Hunter creates an environment that traces Peake’s sad trajectory from prince to pauper. Employing Victorian imagery of death and mourning and related motifs of floral decay and the shipwreck, Hunter maps out a journey that becomes a cautionary tale about the fleetingness of material success and the uncritical nostalgia for the Victorian era.

Catalogue will be available in the Gallery Shop.