Still Life
European Art Academies positioned still life painting at the bottom of their hierarchy. Being the depiction of the things of everyday life, still life was considered a poor container for the lofty concepts found in history, portraiture, and even landscape painting. Dark Chapters challenges this assumption and status. These realistic paintings consist of things that….
Still Life
European Art Academies positioned still life painting at the bottom of their hierarchy. Being the depiction of the things of everyday life, still life was considered a poor container for the lofty concepts found in history, portraiture, and even landscape painting. Dark Chapters challenges this assumption and status. These realistic paintings consist of things that….
Still Life
European Art Academies positioned still life painting at the bottom of their hierarchy. Being the depiction of the things of everyday life, still life was considered a poor container for the lofty concepts found in history, portraiture, and even landscape painting. Dark Chapters challenges this assumption and status. These realistic paintings consist of things that….
Still Life
I think I am an analytic painter, a conceptual artist. I feel this may be an after-thought. David Bowie was suspicious of artists who claimed their work had deliberate meanings. The proof, he said, was that artists title their works after they make them. When a dozen or so paintings are dry, I bring them….
Still Life
I am Métis, a professor, curator, and theorist of Indigenous contemporary art and identity. My mission since 2019 has been to translate into pictures ideas I have worked out in my writing. Occasionally, the translation goes the other way and paintings inform essays. Dark Chapters, the book that accompanies this exhibition, features 17 writers ‘reading’….
Still Life
European Art Academies positioned still life painting at the bottom of their hierarchy. Being the depiction of the things of everyday life, still life was considered a poor container for the lofty concepts found in history, portraiture, and even landscape painting. Dark Chapters challenges this assumption and status. These realistic paintings consist of things that….
Still Life
I returned to still lives at the the o k’inādās, Kelowna still life paintings. I painted this series when I was artist in residence (along with Rebecca Belmore and Adrian Stimpson) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, in the summer of 2016. I decided to illustrate some of the thoughts and feelings I had….
Maps
The River Lot paintings are maps of Métis settlement on the Prairies. Following the French style, 19th century Métis settlements were villages with properties arranged in long, narrow strips leading out from the river. That way, neighbours lived close to each other and had equal access to water and pasture. The Red River Resistance and….
Quilts
Quilts gather bits of everyday material culture together to make a new whole that is itself and yet also only a compilation of past things. They are like people. As a child, I was fascinated by quilts my Mum made from the family’s old clothes. Each blanket held intimate memory fragments of a generation: traces….
Métis Sage
These are experiments. I was trying out different styles to address Metis ancestors and their implications on the present; to use image/text to engage issues that couldn’t be figured by pictures alone. Some directions (such as the teepee tops) became a full series. Others, such as the playful “Louis David Riel (after Jacques Louis David),”….
Beaded
The first maps paintings were “Red River 1870s (beaded map),” (2006), and “Edmonton 1880s (beaded map),” (2006). I was researching Métis material history and was surprised to learn that Edmonton and Winnipeg were originally settled according to the Métis/Quebec style of river lots. I knew about my family’s river lot (lot 7) since childhood, but….
Flags
Communities “rally around the flag.” People “fight for the flag.” It is a symbol of nation and collective identity. Flag/Flower paintings suggest that nations, like their flags, are made things, mutable and fragile. I worry about the dark side of nationalism, including Metis nationalisms—how we distort ourselves into conservative/traditional/uniform patterns in order to be recognizable.
Road Kill
Central to this work is my research along the Carlton Trail (2005-9+). I went to Metis sites and talked to Elders between Winnipeg and Edmonton. Along the way I took photos that became roadkill and drive by paintings. I’d love to see them together. One day, I was doing an artist talk in north central….
Drive by
“Drive by Landscape,” 2003, is my first drive-by painting. I was doing a lot of driving on the Prairies from 2002-10: researching Metis sites and visiting Metis folks. “Drive by Landscape” is of a space between homes in the Garneau district in Edmonton. I also took pictures of flags, clouds, haybales, roadkill, and other things….
Early Still Life
I painted my first still lives in 2003 while Sylvia and I were living in a small apartment with our first child, B. The paintings are small because our apartment/studio was small. They express my competing desires to be a scholar and artist and good parent and partner.The skull paintings were made in the early….
Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?)
Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?) was a large, self-curated exhibition. However, in Brandon it was curated by Cathy Mattes who paired my work with a local Indigenous artist. A practice I echoed in several subsequent iterations. The exhibition is my first full-fledged Metis exhibition. The works wrestle with numerous aspects of Metis history, representation, and identities. ….