05.01.2014 | 06.15.2014
SOVEREIGN ACTS | REBECCA BELMORE, LORI BLONDEAU, ROBERT HOULE, TERRANCE HOULE, SHELLEY NIRO, ADRIAN STIMSON, JEFF THOMAS
Curated by Wanda Nanibush
Opening Reception: May 1, 2014 at 5 PM
Note: This exhibition deals with mature subject matter
The history of Indigenous Peoples performing cultural dances and practices for international and colonial audiences is an important part of Indigenous art generally, and performance art specifically. The Indigenous performers known as 'Indians' faced the conundrum of maintaining traditional cultural practices by performing them on stage while simultaneously having that performance fulfill the desires of a colonial imaginary. In Sovereign Acts, the artists Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Robert Houle, Terrance Houle, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, and Jeff Thomas, contend with the legacy of colonial representations. Drawing on the depiction of the imaginary Indian - the ahistorical, pre-contact 'primitivism' in popular and mass culture - they recover and construct new ways of performing the complexity of Indigenous cultures for a contemporary art audience. Their work returns to the multi-levelled history of 'Performing Indian' to recuperate the erased and objectified performer as an ancestor, an artist, and an Indigenous subject.
Sovereign Acts takes its point of departure from a new video installation by Vancouver-based Anishinabe artist Rebecca Belmore to loosely trace a history of Indigenous performance from the 18th century to present. In the Wilderness Garden (Banff, 1997) sees Belmore pay homage to a captive Mi'kmaw man who was forced to perform a deer hunt in a Victorian garden in the 1700s. The Mi'kmaw man extended his performance by defecating after eating the deer, right in front of his 18th century audience. His act of resistance appropriated the ideas of the 'wild savage' to effectively defy the Victorian values of his 'hosts.' Belmore reads the Mi'kmaw man's action as the beginning of performance art, situating it within the trajectory of actions against the containment of Indigenous bodies and cultures.
Much of the work included in Sovereign Acts is embedded in a tradition of Aboriginal performers making a living when colonialism was in its most aggressive phase. Ironically, performing the very stereotypes of 'savage Indians' and 'princesses' allowed not only for the continuity of traditional dances and practices that were banned, but also a measure of economic independence and physical mobility that was denied many Indigenous peoples in North America who needed passes to leave the reservation.
Embarking from specific historical moments, the artists in Sovereign Acts seek to define themselves from in and outside colonial histories, and within constantly changing traditions of family, home, people, and territory. Performance is an act of cultural and political resistance as well as a means of remembrance and commemoration. It offers glimpses of a forgotten past, and uses creative fiction as a force against colonial narratives of capture, savagery, loss, and disappearance.
Born in Upsala, Ontario, REBECCA BELMORE is an artist currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended OCAD University in Toronto and is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art. Since 1987, her multidisciplinary work has addressed history, place and identity through the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including two solo touring exhibitions: The Named and the Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002); and 33 Pieces, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga (2001).
LORI BLONDEAU is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist and curator based in Saskatoon. She is a co-founder and the current director of TRIBE, one of Canada’s most innovative and exciting Aboriginal arts organizations. Blondeau’s performance, photo, and media-based works have been presented nationally and internationally. She is currently completing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She has collaborated with artist James Luna on a series of installations and a performance titled Dead Fall Revue (2000). Her current work is a series of performances based on memory and home, displacement and decolonization. In 2006, Blondeau’s solo exhibition Grace showed at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. She was part of the Requickening Project with Shelley Niro, present- ed during the 2007 Venice Biennale.
ROBERT HOULE is an Anishinabe artist, curator and scholar. He is a member of Sandy Bay First Nation, Manitoba. He currently lives and works in Toronto. Exhibiting since the early 1970’s, Houle has had many international and national solo and group shows including the multimedia installation Paris/Ojibwa at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris; Indians from A to Z and Sovereignty over Subjectivity at the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Anishnabe Walker Court, an intervention at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and Troubling Abstractions at the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Houle has written many essays and monographs on major contemporary First Nations and Native American artists. His considerable influence as an artist, curator, writer, educator and cultural theorist led to his being awarded the Janet Braide Memorial Award for Excellence in Canadian Art History in 1993; the Eiteljorg Fellowship in 2003; and the Canada Council International Residency Program for the Visual Arts in Paris. Recently, Houle has returned to OCAD University to lecture on Indigenous abstraction in the faculty of art.
TERRANCE HOULE is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe currently living in Calgary. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, Houle received his BFA in 2003. In 2008, Houle was a semifinalist for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. His work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States,Australia, Europe and England. His first major solo exhibition, GIVN’R, opened in 2009 at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg and was exhibited in 2010 at the Art Gallery of York University.
SHELLEY NIRO is a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Mohawk,Turtle Clan. Niro was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1954 and currently lives in Brantford, Ontario. She graduated from OCAD University with honours in visual arts and received her MFA from the University of Western Ontario. In 2001, she became an Eiteljorg recipient at the Museum of Western and Indian Arts, Indiana. Niro participated in the 2003 Women in The Director’s Chair Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In the fall of 2006, Niro was selected to be a fellow with Women in Film and a recipient of a GM Accelerator Grant. Niro’s work can be found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Quebec; the National Gallery of Canada; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Portrait Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Rockwell Museum of Western Art, Corning, New York; the University of Seattle Library; and the National Museum of the American Indian,Washington, DC.
ADRIAN A. STIMSON is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta and a Saskatoon-based interdisciplinary artist. He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. His research has focused on identity, metaphysics, two-spirit people, ecology, spirit and healing modalities within artists’ practice. After completing his BFA at Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Stimson moved to Saskatoon to complete a MFA at the University of Saskatchewan. Stimson was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003 and the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 for his human rights and diversity activism in various communities.
JEFF THOMAS is an Onondaga artist and curator of the Six Nations Confederacy. He was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1956 and currently lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. His photographic work raises issues of racial stereotyping and mutual misunderstanding through references to the histories, symbols, and actualities of urban-Indian experience. He has exhibited widely since 1979. In 2010, the Canadian Cultural Centre presented Unmasking: Arthur Renwick, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas, as part of the PhotoquaiVisual Arts Biennial, organized by the Quai Branly Museum, Paris.Thomas had four solo shows in 2008: Com•mem•o•ra•tion, MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Who’s your Daddy?: Four Hundred Years Later, Karsh/Mason Gallery, Ottawa; Don’t Mess with the Pediment, Stephen Bulger Gallery,Toronto; Drive By: A Road Trip with Jeff Thomas, University of Toronto Art Centre. His curatorial exhibitions are research projects and community engagements involving land claims, residential school history and Indigenous art history.Thomas is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery,Toronto.
WANDA NANIBUSH is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior from Beausoleil First Nations. She is currently curator in residence at the Justina M Barnicke gallery and was the 2013 Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto. She has a masters of visual studies from University of Toronto.
Sovereign Acts is organized and circulated by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
