creative forces

Blog 26…October 2013

I’m very happy to see the rising confidence and exciting visual presence of indigenous artists from here and around the world.  Earlier this year there was Beat Nation at the Power Plant, in the summer I discovered Sakahan at the National Gallery in Ottawa (Blog 23) and here in Toronto, Imaginative, the festival of indigenous film has just finished at the Lightbox. Now, the Ryerson Image Gallery in Toronto has Ghost Dance, activism, resistance and art, created mostly by Aboriginal artists, running until December 15.

The Image Gallery has a fascinating history…opened last year on the Ryerson campus, the collection originated in Berlin in the 1930’s with the Black Star photo agency.  Politics in Germany prompted a move to New York where the agency became the principal source of news photos for magazines and newspapers for the next 70 years, accumulating an archival history of most of the 20^th century.  As other media took over, the Black Star collection moved around for several years, finally being donated to Ryerson, who have created a superb venue to store and exhibit the images. The Gallery also serves as a showplace for Ryerson students and others, providing exposure for a variety of still and moving images.

 

The current show has a focus on injustices and oppression suffered by native people around the world. The pieces range from a series of small screens with phone receivers where we can listen to women incarcerated in a federal prison for native women in Alberta to visual messages from protests at Palm Island, Australia and from Wounded Knee in the US.

Sonny Assu is posed beside posters created from Department of Indian Affairs material encouraging “absorption as the happiest future”.  Although this is moving, it’s his piece called Leila’s Desk that touched my heart most deeply. Sonny’s grandmother was nervous and excited to be the first native person to attend her local high school. Many years later, as an old woman, she still felt the shame of her arrival the first morning to find a bar of Lifebuoy soap sitting on her desk. Sonny has built a replica of the kind of small pine desk used at the time and the offending bar of soap that shouted “dirty Indian”.  My breath caught in my throat when I saw this piece, and in case you get to see the show, which I hope you will, I’m not putting up an image of it so the impact will be as powerful for you as it was for me.

It’s great to see these shows and get to know our fellow Canadians through their art, I hope though that we’re on the way to recognizing and appreciating indigenous art more widely in mainstream galleries. We should be grateful to artists who connect us with the world around us and within us from their own unique viewpoint, whether they’re women, gay, Chinese, white guys…or Aboriginal. 

And, a final thought,  the community of native people, artists and others deserve a loud shout out from the rest of us for the heavy lifting they're doing in preserving our home, the earth.