Terence Gower's enemies and rascals: a Canadian verdict on the American founding
A small London show at the Maughan Library uses colonial-era broadsides to argue that US independence was forged in theft — and that the country has never quite recovered from its origin story.
The most uncompromising show currently on view in London is also one of the smallest. At the Maughan Library, the off-site arm of the city's better-known Courtauld galleries has quietly installed an exhibition by the Canadian artist Terence Gower, and the work, made of paper and borrowed print, makes an unfashionable argument: that the United States was founded on theft, and that the muscle memory of that founding still shapes its politics in 2026.
The thesis is not subtle. Gower, born in Mexico City to a British family and long based in New York, has spent a career thinking about how buildings, monuments and public image encode state power. His new project, Enemies and Rascals, runs at the Maughan Library through the autumn as part of an Artangel commission. He uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American broadsides — single-sheet printed declarations, the cheap media of their day — to build a line of argument that begins with the dispossession of Native American land and runs, by way of the 1759 battle of Quebec, the Revolutionary War and the Mexican-American War, all the way to contemporary trade disputes between the United States and Canada. The implication is that the political style currently on display in Washington — coercion dressed as patriotism — is older than the country itself.
The argument, in print
The exhibition reads more like an archive than a typical gallery hang. Gower has reproduced the texts of colonial-era proclamations, treaties and satirical songs at full scale, lining the narrow rooms of the Maughan with sheets that the contemporary viewer is invited to read. Several pieces riff on the visual language of early American money: colonial notes, the back of which frequently depicted a beheaded or strung-up figure — "cutting notes" — to punish counterfeiting. Gower replaces the bodies with contemporary political imagery, suggesting that the visual habit of producing an enemy in order to unify a polity has not gone anywhere.
The Canadian angle is explicit. The show's title comes from a song Gower attributes to the British side of the 1759 campaign against the French at Quebec, in which American settlers — still loyal to the Crown at that point — are dismissed as "enemies and rascals." That same phrase becomes, in the installation, a frame for thinking about how the language of internal treason has cycled through US political life: Loyalists, Confederates, Reds, and now whoever happens to be on the wrong side of a tariff dispute. The piece ends, as The Guardian's Adrian Searle notes in his review, with a contemporary image relating to the recent tariff fight between the Trump administration and the then-Canadian prime minister Mark Carney — a fight that Gower frames as one more episode in a long, asymmetrical relationship.
The limit of the gesture
The trouble with the show, as Searle rightly observes, is that it never quite catches fire as drama. Gower's tool kit — print, typography, the careful reproduction of primary documents — produces something closer to a scholarly pamphlet than a polemic. The pieces are handsome and the research is honest, but the installation has the flatness of a textbook chapter, not the staging of an argument that wants to change anyone's mind. A visitor who arrives sympathetic will leave sympathetic; a visitor who arrives sceptical will find little in the show's surface to disturb them. It is the kind of work that reads well in a catalogue essay and works less well on a Wednesday afternoon in a room full of students.
That limitation matters, because the subject — the continuity between colonial expropriation and twenty-first-century trade policy — is genuinely contested. The current US administration would dispute the premise outright: tariffs, in its telling, are a tool of reciprocity, not inheritance, and the legal architecture of the founding has long since been cut loose from its eighteenth-century scaffolding. Even sympathetic historians will note that Gower's chosen lineage — Quebec, the Revolution, Mexico, the trade war — elides the equally long American counter-tradition of abolitionist internationalism, Reconstruction, and the post-1945 rules-based order, which together complicate any clean story of national theft. The show knows this, more or less, and ends up gesturing toward it without integrating it.
What the work is actually doing
Read less as a thesis and more as a method, Enemies and Rascals becomes more interesting. Gower is not, in the end, trying to prove that the United States was born bad — a claim he neither needs nor can deliver in a library hallway. He is showing how the print artefacts of a settler state move through time: how a song mocking colonial riffraff can become the rhetorical furniture of a tariff dispute two and a half centuries later; how a beheaded counterfeiter on a colonial banknote can become a defaced political opponent in a present-day caricature. The work is, in plain terms, an archival demonstration that political style is inherited along with political institutions.
That is a smaller claim than the show sometimes seems to make, and a more defensible one. It also sits more easily with what Artangel — the commissioning body, best known for staging work in non-gallery spaces such as a former Bethnal Green bank and a Croydon block of flats — does best: take a serious idea and let a real building do half the work. The Maughan, a working university library attached to King's College, is the right kind of venue for a show about reading. You encounter the prints as you would encounter any other source material, at a desk, with patience required.
The stakes, beyond the room
The reason Enemies and Rascals is worth paying attention to in 2026, even from outside London, is that it offers a vocabulary for a current political dispute that the established press has been struggling to name. The trade fight between Washington and Ottawa is, on its face, about steel, aluminium and automobiles. Underneath, it is about which country gets to define the rules of the North American economy, and on what terms a smaller neighbour absorbs the consequences. Gower's exhibition — modest, paper-based, more archival than agitational — frames that fight as the latest chapter in a long story in which the United States has repeatedly used the language of emergency to extract concessions from the countries on its borders. Whether or not the framing convinces, it is the kind of long-view argument that mainstream coverage rarely makes the space for.
There is also, deliberately or not, a Canadian inflection. The show is by a Canadian artist, addresses a Canadian political dispute, and is installed in a former imperial capital by a curator — Artangel's Michael Morris — who has a long record of supporting work that is uncomfortable to its host. To walk through it is to receive a polite, thoroughly sourced lesson in why the country next door might not always want to take the other one at its word.
The Maughan show does not demand a response from Washington, and it will not get one. What it does, more usefully, is give a viewer the materials — the broadsides, the songs, the banknote imagery, the contemporary tag — to assemble a counter-history of US expansionism for themselves. In an art world still drawn to loud spectacle, that is a quiet and slightly old-fashioned gift.
This article was written by a Monexus staff writer. The exhibition runs at the Maughan Library, London, as an Artangel commission.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artangel
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Gower