There is a pairing of images in the grid of prints entitled EYE, at the very top left—reading like a book, the beginning—that encapsulate the spirit of Marian Maguire's The Enlightenment Project, shown at Wellington's Bowen Galleries in September. There, next to each other, are two male bodies. There is St Sebastian, punctured by arrows. And next to him, all but identical, is another image of a male body taken from a 1517 German battlefield manual for military surgeons, showing bloodletting sites. The difference between the images—and the argument the pairing makes—lies in the arrows: the first, weapons of war; the second, lines on a page that indicate and name and categorise, that summarise knowledge (even if later proven false) and understanding. Different things entirely, except that the visual argument suggests they might be the same kind of thing after all. Knowledge and categorisation might wound just as deeply as any sharpened stick.
Maguire's subject, as we already know from the exhibition title, is the Enlightenment—that age of the West, which is almost certainly still with us in one form
