Review: Récits de la création du monde: La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 7th edition [Art Mûr | La Guilde]
The biennial runs from March until September at several locations within the province (DRAC – Art actuel Drummondville, Galerie d’art Stewart Hall, Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, La Guilde, Maison de la culture Verdun, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, Musée McCord Stewart, and Musée Rimouski).
This, the seventh iteration of the biennial, involves the work of more than sixty artists. Keeping within the generic aspects of biennials, it is organized by curators Lori Beavis, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Jake Kimble, and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé under an umbrella theme, this time being “Stories of Creation.” Also keeping within these norms, there is not much in the BACA that is atypical of local or international biennials in terms of thematics (a loose and barely defined spectre of colonialism, ecologism, spiritualism, etc. are all pretty standard biennial topics).
As curators, Creative Narratives represents for us a circle surrounding different narratives and ways of conceiving the universe. Within this circle, we find distinct but interconnected themes: Turtle Island and the Tale of the Sky Woman, symbolizing life itself; Stories of Place, echoing the voices of the territory's traditional guardians; the four cardinal directions, pointing to the Spirit-Heart-Thought-Body and guiding our inner journeys; the territory’s Sacred Medicines, nourishing and purifying; the enigmatic realm of the Supernatural; and Roots and Revelations, shaping our collective consciousness.
What differentiates this from the province’s other biennials is primarily its stress on the presence of craft (something also highlighted in a panel at the recent art fair). But even this is made to have a specific function. Art is made to serve this thematic in a way that is entirely in keeping with what has been the state’s definition of art and justification of arts funding (knowledge, lived experience, identities, cultural heritage, etc.) for more than half a century. In addition to keeping within quite standard techniques and strategies of display, there is a general stress on the redemptive function of art (evocation, contemplation, captivation, resonance, etc.).
In this exhibition, art evokes family, relationships, history and the legacy of colonization. The guest artists share their knowledge gained from lived experience and their distinct cultural heritage, offering a glimpse into the identities, communities and spiritualities of Aboriginal cultures across the territories. Each contributes to the richness of the narrative, offering a glimpse into complex human existence and the connectedness of all things. Together, they weave a captivating narrative that resonates with audiences, inviting reflection and contemplation.
This type of enframing is not only normative to the state’s Contemporary Art, it is also something common to the marketing of luxury goods. More than half of the voiceover for this Alfa Romeo commercial could be easily exchanged with a biennial wall text.
I only had the opportunity to view two of the seven exhibitions (those at Art Mûr and La Guilde). These contained the works of more than forty of the approximately sixty artists involved, so I presume this was not an entirely unrepresentative sampling (a number of them appear across several exhibitions) but the following should be taken only as a reflection on these two exhibitions and their relationship to the broad framing that they fell within.
While (with a couple of exceptions such as Shelley Niro’s barely competent $95,000 acrylic painting from 1997 at La Guilde) the works on display are not bad, few are especially memorable either. In general, the works are attractive, and I get the impression that some of the craft work is quite fine, but I will not pretend that I have anything remotely intelligent to say about quill work. This is not to be taken in any way dismissively. Creating attractive objects is admirable, but there is not much to say about them, and they do not seem designed for a discursive response but to be lived with.
Mostly, it all feels very familiar. It has the signs of a sampling of sub-genres, and the vagueness of the theme does not do much to assuage this. So this review is primarily about curation and some incidental frictions between works that may or may not have been intended.
To make the obvious point, if you showed any of these works in the context of other works or simply on their own, they would take on different meanings and different qualities. Curation sets up a limited type of resonance. The concrete existence of the works in this instance is as the signatures of a set of careers (the most consistently narrativized aspect) and within a loose narrative constructed as part of a governmentally sponsored exhibition that has a quite specific conceptualization of art even if its concept of content is a bit woolly.
The exhibition at La Guilde fills up the narrow centre of the space. There is a customary wall text, a video that can be heard throughout the space, but most of the works are set up in a station-by-station format, with Niro’s painting set high at the far end to crown it (presumably because it relates most directly to the exhibition title). There is not much to say about the exhibition at La Guilde which is leadenly curated to the point of sterility. It feels like looking at the art in a hospital ward. But, as I will discuss later, this ends up highlighting (I assume unintentionally) a few things about the works it shows.
The exhibition at Art Mûr spans two floors and, while the primary area of the second floor is more dominated by sculptural works than not, in general the different media are intermixed. A few artists recur throughout (notably, Alan Syliboy, who is made to operate as a kind of elder, in the sense that he is an older, established artist, presence throughout) but the works are usually singular or a small clustered set. Wall texts identify the works, offer biographies of artists, and statements about the works or their broader practices.
Both floors contain a video work that provides some ambient audio texture to the exhibition. On the second floor this works particularly effectively and the passage from one brightly lit space, to a dark one, and into a light one again gives a nice nuance to the experience. The use of coloured accent walls also works more effectively here than it usually does in the gallery.
The thematic of creation seems to suggest both the sacred or spiritual sense of the term and that of the artist as creator. There may be overlap between these two things, as is frequently implied by a stress on the situatedness of art production. These creators tend to operate along very different lines, something which is incidentally stressed in the ways they are biographed, a difference which I will assume was the result of the choices of the artists themselves more than the curators. So, in their professional identities, some artists are framed almost strictly in terms of their craft (who they learned from, where they practice it, the contours of their careers), while others are defined more in terms of political identities and the intentional practices they associate with these.
That what is being produced, at least in part, is sacred art as either a commodity or a spectacle, something that is certainly foregrounded by the substantial price tags attached to many of the works next to the artist’s identitarian statements and equally by some works making explicit note of not being for sale (such as the work of the tīná gúyáńí collective). While this may raise some interesting questions, they are not really explored, in part because the quality of the curation reduces each aspect to simply another object/text. More than anything else they are presented as government-sponsored luxury commodities. This is not intended as a flip remark but it is something that likely should be kept in perspective given how some of the works in the exhibition are framed. It is atypical for an exhibition of Contemporary Art in the city to be so consistently explicit about its financial aspect.
It is tempting to interpret something that has foregrounded the question of narrative so explicitly in terms of what kind of narrative it ends up creating. Much of the curation is oriented around pedagogy (at least in a hand-waving way), both in the sense of portraying ways of learning and in teaching the viewer through narrative. In this, it fulfills a traditional museological imperative in terms of gesture, but less persuasively in terms of practice. I am not arguing that art ought to be pedagogical or treated in pedagogical terms (if anything, I would argue against this), but if you frame it in that fashion, you set up a set of expectations. Claiming the instructiveness of art is an instruction for how to view it.
A single image or object, generally, is not narrative per se. It might be part of one, or depict an aspect of one, and certainly could be animated as part of a series or through the employment of supplementary materials. Or it might be the depiction of an event, which is not exactly the same as a narrative.
While the works at La Guilde are mostly given full textual glosses of their narrative import, at Art Mûr, narratives within the works are consistently implied, but they are also either esoteric or highly localized by nation or clan (in ways that generally are not glossed), and so they remain mostly indecipherable to an outsider encountering them. This provides them with an intriguing quality that verges on the anti-social (or at least, not exactly communicative). I am not suggesting this is intentional or bad, but it is an effect of the curation.
While we are informed of the centrality of storytelling to the work of Christian Chapman, we are given little indication of the story involved in the painting itself (if there is one). Perhaps if one lived in proximity to him this would be different, or you might at least have been instructed, either formally or not, about what was being referenced. People knew what Breugel paintings were referencing (at least some of the time) when they were first displayed, but now most of them require supplementary information to actually work as narratives. They work well as paintings for mostly formal reasons and the same is true of Chapman. So what the curation does, in effect, is to display it in a way that de-narrativizes it while mystifying the narrative aspect and retaining it as an ingredient in his career (which we are told about in terms of his government awards). In this strategy, the artwork functions more as a “proof” for an implied narrative about various careers. (It might have been interesting to know to what extent or if these careers intersect, but this narrative aspect -- and what it could have meant in terms of presentation and arrangement -- is not presented in the curation.)
In terms of career narratives, these can often come off rather like an advertisement (which is effectively what they are):
Kaylyn is a Northern Tutchone and Tlingit artist from the Yukon and a citizen of Selkirk First Nation, but based out of Whitehorse. Kaylyn is an avid beader, using a variety of materials and textiles, and drawing on the principals of visual art to create her own designs. In addition to making jewelry, Kaylyn’s beadwork adorns garments and accessories, including mukluks, moccasins, and purses. She is also exploring ASMR.
There is an implied tension throughout between presenting the work as a distinct statement which may or may not distance works themselves from commodities, and presenting them as luxury goods. Both of these things have implications for artist’s careers. This narrative tension puts in question how the works should (or can) be interpreted, particularly in the context of one another.
As far as the implied narrative drama goes, much of the work on display is about different means for “embodying” such narratives. One way to do this is by an appeal to tradition (possibly the most common strategy employed here) and one that, in the absence of other examples of that particular tradition, which is itself sometimes localized within a family or limited area, is not terribly visually meaningful.
Perhaps the most successful visual articulation of embodying locality is Heather Shillinglaw’s collage works, which persuasively use form to densely navigate family histories and their intimate relationship to the land, and ably integrates the communicative function rather than being stuck with clunky supplementary statements.
Another way of implying a narrative is through the curatorial attempt to cast works as formally dramatizing a “conflict” between methodologies in which the resultant "conflicted" work embodies the tensions of colonial history. Both ways stress formal norms and techniques. The former tends to vague pseudo-narratives embodied through the weaving of clichés into objects that retain a tactile immediacy even as they become detached from function. The latter relies on an also vague (and less concrete) appeal to narrative clichés that are employed in a more overtly representational way, even if the results do not “speak for themselves” but require mediation.
There are roughly two ways in which this “conflict” is dealt with, one which foregrounds the ostensible content of the work and the other which focuses more on the career of the artist and their work, its place in the market (they do not use anything as crude as the word “market”). It is the latter that rehearses some rather generic and not especially helpful bifurcations between “tradition” and “modernity” or “Indigenous” art and “Contemporary” art which are extremely historically questionable in practice, something that was extensively pointed out decades ago in exhibition catalogues like Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives (1992) or In the Shadow of the Sun: Perspectives on Contemporary Native Art (1993). These distinctions seem imposed (by curators, the market, and artists themselves) as a framing device that largely misrepresents the actual function that such work historically possesses. A great deal of it comes off like cosplay (incidentally one of the sculptures by Skawennati is called Otsitsakáion Cosplay Costume).
Lest there be any confusion, I am not suggesting for a second that the artists should not make money, and even foreground this aspect if that’s what they want. But the monetary aspect here, the variance between commercial and non-commercial (and how broad that first category is), is one aspect that the artists (presumably) as well as the curators, have interjected within the textual supplementation. The point is that if a work is market-directed and marketed (which raises a pretty concrete question about what “community” it actually “belongs” to), this becomes an aspect of it and part of what it means, particularly given the ways it tends to be framed here (the biennial itself, as indicated at the opening of this article, is explicitly a marketing device).
A quite different variation of this kind of glamorization occurs on the ground floor. According to the textual supplement:
Oakley Rain Wysote Gray is from Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. She identifies as Trans Two-Spirit and use the pronouns she/her. Oakley is a fashion designer that draws inspiration from Mi’gmaq culture and the daily injustices on Indigenous people. Her goal is to educate as much as possible, through her voice and through fashion. Not only does her work highlight the stories of her ancestors, it also displays the impact of systemic racism and colonization.
While this sits quite comfortably around the curve in the wall from Cora Kavyaktok’s set of pretty generic glamour photos of models spaced in decontextualizing black and glazed in a sheen of cosmetics to accentuate the jewellery that the figures wear, they are both, at least superficially, distant from Jobena Petonoquot’s Ceremony with the King which sits facing them. If Gray’s work is ambiguous enough to be interesting, Petonoquot’s work is significantly more heavy-handed and ends up interesting in a very different way.
Ceremony with the King refers to current events, as Canada continues to be governed by the British Empire, which is obvious since I'm an Aboriginal person from the Kitigan Zibi reserve. I know that an aboriginal reserve is land that was set aside by the British monarchy. And that it was a colonial tactic to seize the land they wanted so desperately that it could force them to commit deplorable crimes.
The two works by her presented at La Guilde follow an almost identical pattern and set of formal strategies, mixing traditional craft work with pretty simplistic exhibition strategies from installation art, combined with similar texts to the one just cited. Generously, you could argue that the truncated use of space that was likely forced on her work to make it fit in situ hobbles it in ways that it might not otherwise have suffered. This is not helped by the fact that, in contrast to most of that around her at both locations, her craft work is mediocre at best (although that may ultimately say more about Concordia’s MFA programme than anything else). Or maybe the shoddiness is supposed to give it a more “pathetic” quality and intended to function in an emotionally manipulative way to go along with the framing rhetoric. In the end, they come off as the kitsch exploitation of a vague fantasm of historical trauma that she has commodified (presumably) for purchase (they hover around $12,000 a piece) by ideological institutions for propaganda functions.
Eruoma Awashish’s work follows a roughly analogous road in terms of its theme but is considerably more concise and coherent in technical and expressive terms. Her taxidermied fox with rosaries falling out of its gut as it approaches a sacred space is a strong and striking image, even if its significance is less clear than the supplemental text suggests.
The decolonization of the sacred is at the heart of her practice, as she appropriates the symbols of the Catholic religion to make them her own. It's a way for her to reappropriate her own spirituality and reverse the relationship of domination that the Catholic religion has had over indigenous peoples.
There is a certain sense of irony about the works just discussed when they are posed in the context of something like Jay Havens’ The Bargain Hunted Buck, which draws on his background as a scenographer and costume designer and applies some traditional techniques to industrial plastics. The works are inspired by the “number of corporate retail centers they witnessed setting up on band land and the kinds of marketing and urban design that went into these spaces. They wonder how these spaces negotiate around and with the Indian Act.” The results are more acerbic than those of Awashish and Petonoquot, and, like Gray’s work discussed earlier, suggest something far more ambiguous about their topic while reflecting on their status as a commodity ($14,000). His “decolonization” of corporate trash is the production of luxury goods.
Perhaps nothing more effortlessly (and, strictly within this context but not on its own, ironically) tops all of this than Marcy Friesen’s striking Untitled (KFC Bucket), which doubles the fast food container by beading over its surface and adding elaborate details. This is accompanied by a biographical text about her family and career.
* Images from the Art Mûr and BACA Instagrams.