Burning bright

Opinion

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This article was published 01/06/2016 (2878 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every artist tests boundaries, even if they’re simply the limits of a medium or one’s own skill. For indigenous artists, though, there’s more at stake.

A diverse, developing concept, “decolonization” is about more than renegotiating borders and resisting bigotry and genocide: it’s positive and sustaining, extending to every small act of being and becoming. It’s about maintaining tradition and traditional knowledge in a contemporary context, about building self-determined communities at all levels, and about observing, honouring, and cultivating indigenous excellence in the face of systemic efforts to undermine and erase it.

Urban Shaman, one of only a handful of galleries in the country dedicated to indigenous contemporary art, has been a crucible for these ideas since its founding 20 years ago, and The Fire Throws Sparks celebrates their spread since 1996.

Comprising older, recent and reimagined works by 11 artists with ties to the gallery, the smartly curated exhibition spans generations and disciplines, embracing resistance, reflection and formal exploration, poetry and protest, tenderness and humour.

Two oversize posters from KC Adams’s Perceptions project, familiar from their stints on bus shelters and storefront windows around the city, open the show with their bold but ambivalent “good as you” messaging.

Just around the corner, Scott Benesiinaabandan’s own defiant gestures are sillier but more nuanced. In three photographs he stands in front of retail echoes of colonialism (a “Mayflower” moving truck, the “Occidental” Hotel) brandishing a dead goldeye — the fish not just out of water but entombed in Styrofoam and shrink-wrap.

Governor General’s Award winner Rebecca Belmore delivers, as she often does, mixed messages with the impact of a one-two punch. Her ominous Mixed Blessings gives silent voice the twinned pride and degradations of being indigenous woman and artist in a violently racist and misogynistic culture. A plaster-white figure like a drowned woman or revenant ghost emerges from a pool of its own black hair, clad in a hoodie blazoned with the interlocking mottoes: “F—-N INDIAN,” “F—-N ARTIST.”

Sobey Art Award winner Nadia Myre meditates on “red” in dazzling photographic enlargements of beaded rondels, stitched freehand without pattern or premeditation, that evoke mandalas, areolae, drum skins or gently seeping wounds. In one early video, she slices through the surface of a steaming lake in a canoe, held aloft on a shaft of light that cuts across the screen. In another, bloodier video, she receives a tattoo of the Kanata flag— the Canadian flag’s maple leaf swapped for a trio of red eagle feathers.

Brandon-based Peter Morin, whose multimedia works posit revelatory but eventually obvious parallels between indigenous ceremony and conceptual art, obscures a pair of aged photographic portraits in glittering shards of rock candy. Called Thaw, the works dually invoke the yearly breakup of ice and sugaring as a method of preservation. Lita Fontaine strikes a similar balance of traditions in her multimedia installation The Woman’s Drum, in which a hide drum speaker thrums out a recorded heartbeat, flanked at the cardinal directions by Eagle Staffs and banners bearing photographs of women’s torsos.

Kevin McKenzie’s engrossing Sexy Beast situates a neon-clad resin cast of a bison skull in a purpose-built room, evoking the light and space experiments of James Turrell.

Elsewhere, delightfully syncretic paintings by Fontaine, Linus Woods, Louis Ogemah, Roger Crait, and Melissa Wastasecoot playfully imagine “Urban Shaman” personas, blending references to western painting with indigenous motifs and motivations. (Ogemah’s patchwork of painted canvas and denim and Wastasecoot’s overpainted reproductions of paintings by Raphael, Holy Families swapped for smiling Sasquatches, are particular highlights.)

A welcome show of strength from a vitally important gallery, The Fire Throws Sparks continues until June 30, culminating in Urban Shaman’s 20th Anniversary gala Aug. 4, where some of the works in the show will be up for auction.

 

Steven Leyden Cochrane is a Winnipeg-based artist, writer and educator.