[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/maggs edited.jpg” caption=”The McMaster Museum of Art will display Arnaud Maggs’s Nomenclature exhibit from Nov. 23 to Jan. 20. Photo courtesy of McMaster Museum of Art.”]Arnaud Maggs, internationally acclaimed Canadian artist and winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award, uses his camera as a way of representing and ordering aspects of the past. He has been called a photo-anthropologist, a cultural historian and a lover of systems.

An exhibition of his recent work, Nomenclature, will be on display at the McMaster Museum of Art from Nov. 23 through Jan. 20, 2007.

At the age of 47, Arnaud Maggs abandoned his successful career as a graphic designer and fashion photographer.

“I decided out of the blue I wanted to be an artist,” he says. He is now best known for his serial photographs of everything from mug shots and death notices to French hotel signs and grid-like portrait studies of such notable Canadians as Northrop Frye, Irving Layton, Yousuf Karsh and Leonard Cohen.

In Nomenclature, Maggs investigates classifications of colour by shooting each page of two 19th century texts.

The first, Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (1814), was praised by Darwin for its merits to the arts and sciences. It contains pages of colour chits, accompanied by listings of the colour's appearance in other forms in nature.

Werner's entries are in themselves enchanting. For example, one bluish-green chit is described as “Egg of Thrush,” “Under Disk of Wild Rose Leaves,” and “Beryl.”

The other text, Cercles Chromatiques (1861) by M.E. Chevreul, is a rare publication of purely theoretical content including 11 colour wheels.

According to exhibition curator, Linda Jansma, Maggs's selection of these particular texts is “a continuation of a practice that has been over 40 years in the making. That these works are not only intellectually stimulating, but also stimulating in their beauty, makes them works of lasting importance.”

The exhibition is a collaborative project of the M.M.A., the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, and Gallery One, One, One, Winnipeg.

A public reception will be held on Thursday, Nov. 23, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.