Joseph McGlennon’s first Michael Reid Southern Highlands exhibition is a survey of the artist’s most recent photographs, and follows the online presentation of Decade, 2021 (an exhibition which never saw a physical audience due to covid related stay-at-home orders). This is the first time McGlennon’s Silentium suite has seen public display, as is also the worldwide premiere of McGlennon’s newest work, Culloden.
In McGlennon’s large, panoramic masterwork Culloden 2022, we witness the final confrontation between rivals; one in which no quarter is to be given. Two 16-point Imperial Stags, at the height of their powers, lock antlers in a clash that echoes across the Glen. The symbolism of the Stags, and the very name of the artwork, reference not only the artist’s Scottish birthplace but indeed the last pitched battle of the Jacobite uprising of 1746 and a defining moment in British history.
In 1789 the Romantic Scottish poet, Robert Burns alluded to the Jacobite as quarry in a deer hunt,
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.
In Culloden, 2022 the artist states that some moments are decisive and that like Burns, his heart is in the Highlands. This exhibition will be the first presentation of McGlennon’s work in the Southern Highlands and in itself, a defining moment.
