art gallery of ontario before and after the horizon toronto star

Art Gallery of Ontario: Before and After the Horizon | Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2014/07/25/art_gallery_of_ontario_before_and_after_the_horizon.html[2014-07-26 11:59:24 AM]

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Entertainment / Visual Arts

Art Gallery of Ontario: Before and After theHorizonAn exhibition of aboriginal art and artifacts from around the Great Lakes region looksto change the conversation on how such shows are made.

CHRIS SO / TORONTO STAR Order this photoA detail shot of Beavers, a 2003 large scale mobile created by Frank Shebageget comprised ofbasswood and metal featuring models of basswood de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver floatplanes, theworkhorse transport for northern bush and remote Anishinaabe communities.

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22Toronto



By: Murray Whyte Visual arts, Published on Fri Jul 25 2014

Over the years, museum-scale exhibitions of First Nations art in this country have oftenfelt like apologies: redress, in some embarrassingly small way, for the astonishinglitany of wrongs inflicted on native populations by colonial interlopers over threecenturies of occupation of their ancestral lands.

As a result, too often such things have come across as either tokenistic or ghettoizing: aweird sort of supplication by the conqueror to appease the conquered and a salve for ajustifiably guilty conscience. This is no comment on the work itself, which at its best issome of the most powerful made in this country in the past half-century, but rather theimpulse to lump together semi-like things under a generalized rubric, hived off from itsartistic peers.

Before and After the Horizon, which opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario Saturday, can'thelp but be front-loaded with these things.

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It is, after all, a broad omnibus show of art and artifacts from several millennia ofAnishinaabe culture, the umbrella group for various Indian nations clustered aroundthe Great Lakes.

Maybe, though, it's also something else. Nearby, in the museum's Canadian galleries,works by native artists have been installed almost as though bleeding out of the space:the haunting, gorgeous presence of the late Ojibway artist Carl Beam's Time Dissolve, atowering canvas of old residential school class photos lost in a bleak wash of pale painthung near old nationalist chestnuts by Group of Seven icons Lawren Harris and A.Y.Jackson; or Norval Morrisseau's remarkable five-panel painting Man Changing IntoThunderbird occupying an appropriately prominent place at the gallery's core.

Andrew Hunter, the AGO's curator of Canadian art, spoke of the show as anopportunity and a corrective. The goal was to bring the show to Toronto to representits vision, but to position it more deeply and strongly in this place so it could be acatalyst for rethinking our permanent collection, Hunter said the other day.

The show was conceived long before Hunter's arrival here last year, in partnership firstwith the Detroit Institute of Arts and now the National Museum of the AmericanIndian, which showed the exhibition at its space in New York earlier this year.

But Hunter means it to be a signpost, a goodbye to that odd convention of ghettoizingexhibitions of native art, and the intention is admirable though the show itself feels a

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little scattered and surface-skimming, trying to take in 10,000 years of a culture at asingle pass (at times, it seems mostly like an opportunity to trot out rarely seen worksby the late Morrisseau, a crowd-pleaser if there ever was one).

Nonetheless, the show breaks ground by addressing, however subtly, wrong-headedpast notions of representing aboriginal culture. In one room, subtitled simply Place,Bonnie Devine, a contemporary Ojibway artist working in Toronto, presents two piecestied to her birthplace on the Serpent River First Nation on the north shore of LakeHuron.

Nearby, a case of stone tools dating back 8,000 years sits under glass; Devine's pair ofworks, Letter to Grandfather and Letter to William, both from 2008, use abstractedimages of the hard granite of the Canadian Shield of her ancestral homeland pairedwith her handwriting.

Context, as they say, is everything. While the tools are drawn from the land, so isDevine's work, with purpose not so practical: in her letters, Devine writes to WilliamWarren, an Ojibway who in the 19th century learned English well enough to write ahistory of his people in parallel with colonial accounts of the day; and to hergrandfather, a signatory to the callously unjust treaty the government of Canadapresented to his people, which gave all but the smallest portion of their land away.

The juxtaposition is poignant and affecting, Devine's work deepened by the quietpresence of thousands of years of history linked to the land itself. It's also treading ondelicate ground. Consider the words of Robert Houle, a senior First Nations artist andcurator based in Toronto and one of the country's best. He's in the show, representedby several pieces, many of them charged with his signature, simmering discontent atthe arc of colonial oppression.

Thirty years ago, it would have been impossible to show contemporary artists withwhat's become known as artifacts, Houle says. But institutions have made real effortsto unlock the colonial structures of the anthropological framework. The fact is, theseobjects really do represent our history and the connections are real.

Here, you'll find traditional bead and quillwork, and basket-making alongsidepolitically charged pieces. For someone like Houle, who has made a career of tiltingmightily at the gross injustices of colonial rule, something here must be working forhim to find common ground. Time passes and things change. Not so long ago, Indianartifacts were most often displayed in museums in North America as relics, as inAncient Egypt or the Aztecs in Mexico: culture under glass, long dead and fossilized forpreservation.

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To suggest it was an indignity to a section of the population who felt acutely alive andwell but stymied by lack of inclusion in the discussion about how their culture wasrepresented was putting it mildly. In 1986, the San Diego Museum of Man, ananthropology museum, helped start a new conversation when it accepted a proposalfrom James Luna, an American Indian artist with a point to make. Luna, clad only in asuede loincloth, lay prone in a museum vitrine amid a display of Kumeyaay Indianartifacts in 1986.

The performance was intentionally obvious and searingly critical, declaring loudly thataboriginal culture was a living, evolving thing. Luna's gesture came at a time whenother native artists in North America were making similar confrontational declarations,Houle among them, decrying colonial oppression while reinvigorating traditional craftin the context of contemporary reality. That these gestures were often political gavethem fire and force, and Before and After the Horizon doesn't shy away from that.

Michael Belmore opens the show with a remarkable sheaf of battered copper on whichis carved a map of North America. It suggests colonialism 2.0, with the land itself, notits people, the most recent victim of a culture happy to rip it to pieces to free up themineral wealth below. A similarly arresting moment comes in the next room, whereFrank Shebageget's installation Beavers hangs. Hundreds of tiny seaplanes thetitular Beavers, which enabled colonization of remote portions of the north aresuspended in a dense cluster. The intimation of a swarm of locusts, ready to consumeeverything in its path is as jarring as the piece is gorgeous.

In one powerful room, two pieces from Houle's series Premises for Self Rule hang neara potent, towering canvas by late artist Carl Beam. Houle's works are diptychs, pairingtext from five pieces of Canadian legislation that set out the boundaries of the nascentnation of Canada with turbulent monochrome abstract paintings. The boundaries areboth geographic and social, violent in their own ways to the ancient aboriginalterritories and generations of its people: the British North America Act, which drew itsown lines over centuries of traditional native territories, or the infamous Indian Act, amuch loathed document that has governed First Nations' relationship to the Canadiangovernment and still does.

Nearby is Beam's potent Burying the Ruler, a huge canvas with an image of the artist,shirtless and long-haired, holding a small metal ruler in his hand. The title is literal Beam performed a ritualistic act of embedding a ruler in the earth but feel free toextrapolate. Beam was symbolically rejecting both an imperial system of order and theruling class that imposed it.

Here especially, Before and After the Horizon feels familiarly fiery that oldapologetic space, where the conquerors self-flagellate in reparation but in the greaterspan of the show it's something else as well. Before and After the Horizon has its flawsand it won't please everyone, native and non-native alike (Rebecca Belmore, probablyCanada's best-known Anishinaabe artist, declined to be part of it), but as a simplegesture meant to steer away from old modes of engagement laced with eggshell-

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treading politicized score-settling, it succeeds.

It's oversimplified, surely, but its broad embrace of a single people and their culturalproduction across the ages is weirdly radical. Beefs with the colonial structure are fairenough and have produced truly great art, some of which is here, like Houle's andBeam's and Nadia Myre's, which redacts the Indian Act with traditional beadwork.

As powerful as such works are on their own, they've been just as useful for museumseager for absolution through self-indictment. But they only tell part of the story. Beforeand After the Horizon doesn't tell all of it, but it at least acknowledges there is one.

We're part of the conversation now, not just as artists, Houle says. That's a majordifference. If Before and After the Horizon accomplishes anything, it's that. Let's keeptalking.

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