It’s a Horse of Course!
‘It’s a Horse of Course!’ Was a collaberative pop up exhibition shown by Angus Hamilton James and Finley Highton in 2026 at the Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition set out from an image from Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ series, reconstituting it into a line 1 pixel high, which ran across the space.
The curatorial text reads:
‘It’s a Horse, of Course’ is a collaborative artwork by Angus Hamilton James and Finley Highton made as part of their ‘Sketches for an Exhibition’ series, a series of 3 pop-ups contained within GSA and made in situ. These sketches are spontaneous starting points for exhibitions never intended to truly materialise, which, when performed in series, form an exhibition of parts.
The artwork’s title is taken from a short essay by Paul Garner, which explores equine paleontology as a means to justify creationism. The sarcastic tone of the title acts as a means to deny extinct equine specimens as being distinctly separate species to the modern day horse, and instead argue these specimens simply show in-species variation after the flood caused by God in Genesis.
The artwork explores line drawing, as a method of connecting concepts, and as a method of drawing. It reconstitutes the contact sheet of a zoopraxiscope from Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion: Plate 617 (Nude Man Riding Horse)’ which depicts a white horse galloping against a black background, with a naked jockey riding it. This photograph, broken down into rows of pixels, has been rearranged to create a continuous line intersecting the space, intersected by material and spatial limitations.
This practice of drawing lines seeks to highlight the nature of a line as an archival tool, a mirror, a net, and a web.