At the portal to an Art Gallery of Ontario display of Canadian art called A National Story, a wall graphic tells us that “a common thread in our history is a willingness to engage in dialogue and negotiation.” The First Nations artists participating in a new exhibition right next door to A National Story would probably disagree.
You just have to look at Maria Hupfield’s moccasins made from pages from the Indian Act, or Nadia Myre’s beaded-over pages of the same document, or Bonnie Devine’s diptych photo-textual piece about signatories to the Robinson Huron Treaty to know that “dialogue and negotiation” has, at best, an ironic resonance for these artists. One of the recurring themes of the new exhibition, Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes, is that “negotiated” documents have often damaged indigenous lives, and that real dialogue with non-natives and government seldom occurs.
Most of the show’s text- or map-based works project a bitter, humorous or simply gob-smacked perception that since the settlers arrived, paper has beaten rock every time. Carl Beam’s large painted photowork Burying the Ruler depicts the artist during a 1992 performance in which he ritually buried a symbol of the means by which native territories were measured and parcelled out as private or Crown property. Devine’s mural Battle for the Woodlands riffs on a pre-Confederation map owned by the AGO, which she blows up and transforms into a space where tiny conquering soldiers perch on the bleeding bodies of spirit animals. This AGO-commissioned piece stands inside the rooms reserved for A National Story, and is one of several pointed “interventions” the curators of Before and After the Horizon have made in the gallery’s Canadian collections.
But this extremely varied show contains many works that have little or nothing to do with the impact of non-native settlement on Anishinaabe life.
There are heavily beaded Potawatomi shoulder bags and painted Chippewa drums; boxes of birchbark and quill; and blades made of copper or Norwood chert, an easily-worked Great Lakes stone. Curators Gerald McMaster (of Siksika First Nation) and David Penney (of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington) extend their purview as far back as the material record allows, an attitude supported by the 11,000-year-old arrowheads displayed in the Ancient Memory gallery that leads to the new show.
You could say that the first and main subject of this exhibition is the Earth itself, as a nurturing and often mystical environment. The human figures in Norval Morrisseau’s boldly coloured Psychic Space are equal to and at one with the birds, animals and vegetation that swirl around them. In Blake Debassige’s earth-toned paintings, the epic deeds of animikiig (thunderbirds) and nishibizhiig (sea panthers) turn land and sea into scenes of supernatural action. The floral patterns that bloom on anonymous beaded Chippewa leggings – echoed in Christi Belcourt’s very recent paintings – are all about celebrating the fecundity of the Earth.
Many artists in the show, like Hupfield and Myre, find new and provocative ways to use old handcrafts. Others absorb things from non-native visual cultures. Andrea Carlson’s visceral stylized diptych Aatisokaanag (Spirits) depicts a mythical tale of magic and revenge, while borrowing something from the past and present of Japanese art. Patrick DesJarlait’s fluid modernist labour paintings from the 1940s inevitably recall the murals of Diego Rivera.
Some artists use the riot and detritus of non-indigenous cultures to critique the disposable society. Wally Dion’s huge, glistening Thunderbird is made of discarded circuit boards on plywood. Ron Noganosh’s Shield for a Modern Warrior is reinforced with flattened beer cans – a trace of rez humour that is rare in this show. Frank Big Bear Jr.’s Chemical Man in a Toxic World is a fever-dream collage of small cartoon-like apparitions, carefully worked out with coloured pencils on three large sheets of paper.
Keesic Douglas’s Lifestyle photo series smoothly sends up the system of “native chic” that places a higher value on co-optable commodities than on the cultures they reference. The meaning of buckskins has everything to do with who wears them. Belcourt makes a similar point relative to the land, in the title of her large floral canvas, So Much Depends Upon Who Holds the Shovel.
Perhaps the strongest juxtaposition of native and non-native views comes in another “intervention”: Beam’s Time Dissolve, a large streaked and notated collage of photos from residential schools. It stands inside A National Story, near Frances Loring’s larger-than-life 1938 sculpture, Eskimo Mother and Child. The primitivist romance of the Loring figure seems especially hollow next to Beam’s harsh reminder of what happened to so many indigenous mothers’ children.
The interventions don’t penetrate the large permanent exhibition of the Thomson Canadian Collection, located not far off. Indigenous objects do appear in the Group of Seven rooms, but they don’t seem to work the same way. They’re deployed more like subordinate indigenous seconders of whatever visions the urban white painters were at pains to put on canvas. This imposed hierarchy becomes even harder to accept once you’ve seen Before and After the Horizon. Anishinaabe artists have not often been at home in the AGO, but they have every reason to be there, in one of the outstanding group exhibitions of the summer.
Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through Nov. 25 (ago.net).