Philadelphia Weekly

Ann-Marie LeQuesne is an impresario of reenactments. The London-based artist is all about that frisson of truth achieved through play-acting history. What's different about LeQuesne--whose exhibit "After the Fact" opened last week at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery--is that she's restaging not a famous moment in history but a famous moment as documented in a lying little photograph.

The historical moment in question is the execution of Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph in 1867 by a firing squad under orders of Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. (You may know of this incident because Eduard Manet made a famous painting of it.)

LeQuesne's enterprise is derived from an antique carte-de-visite, or souvenir postcard, probably one of thousands reproduced anonymously and sold in Mexico at the site of the execution. The carte-de-visite, meant to look like a photographic witness account, smacks of artifice. The hill looks like scenery. The emperor looks like he's onstage, and the spectators look like they're in an orchestra pit. Someone used their imagination here and sold it as truth.

LeQuesne is interested in that artificial truth. In her reenactments nobody wears a costume, there are no guns and the spectators are obviously Photoshopped in. And the emperor? He and the generals have been posed variously--on a pile of snow, standing on pedestals or even on the Art Museum steps.

If artifice is the engine, serendipity is the cafe car, providing amusement and refreshment. The little carte-de-visite, for example, is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (as is a Mexican retablo based on it). And except for the quirks of scheduling, those two items would be in LeQuesne's show. But when her show was postponed to the same time the Museum of Modern Art is running its special "Manet and the Execution of Maximilian" exhibit, the two items went to New York, and LeQuesne's exhibit got digital reproductions instead.

Is she upset? No. "This isn't going to break my heart," she says. "The whole thing is about copying anyway."

For drama and oddness, LeQuesne's photos of her reenactments, especially the ones staged at the Tate Museum in London, more than hold their own against the source material. They're great. And the Mexican retablo paintings the artist commissioned as copies of the Tate photos are a heavenly twist. Their hot colors reinforce the idea of individual imagination applied to history and fact.

In a sidebar to her project, LeQuesne applied police detective techniques to her reenactments, interrogating witnesses and videotaping the interviews. The results, also in the show, reinforce the slipperiness of reality.

"My question is, is there ever an objective account?" asks LeQuesne, smiling. And that is indeed the question.

�

For more on the Philadelphia art scene go to fallonandrosof.blogspot.com

�

"Ann-Marie LeQuesne: After the Fact"
Through Nov. 22. Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, 333 S. Broad St. 215.717.6480. www.uarts.edu