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Tracing a path 

By Karen Herland

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When Sherry Farrell Racette came to Concordia’s Art History Department, she was attracted by our already established expertise in Canadian, and particularly aboriginal, art.

Doing her graduate work in western Canada, she heard of many indigenous artists and curators who had graduated from Concordia. She decided to curate an exhibit of their work when she arrived here.

Given the influence those artists had wielded in the community, she was surprised to learn that only 13 aboriginal students had passed through the department, led by Janice Toulouse Chartrand in 1985. All but one of them are featured in Izhizkawe: To Leave Tracks to a Certain Place, at the FOFA Gallery until June 14.

“They came through the department one at a time, almost single file,” Farrell Racette said, at an informal reception for the artists held on May 20. “But collectively, when you line them up, they have made quite an impact.”

The artists and curators featured in Izhizkawe have built a community by hearing about each other’s work while at school, or afterwards.

Ryan Rice founded Nation to Nation with Concordia graduate Scawennati Tricia Fragnito and Eric Robertson to build on the interest in aboriginal art developed in 1992 during the 350th anniversary events in Montreal. “There was so much activity, and the next year nothing happened.”

Working with several other artists currently featured in Izhizkawe, they continued to mount exhibitions for over a decade. Rice, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, is also involved in the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (www.aboriginalcuratorialcollective.org).

Farrell Racette credits that project with helping to organize Izhizkawe. “It’s hard to mount an exhibit on a fairly limited budget. This show was curated on Facebook. The members of the collective knew how to find the others.”
The show itself features a variety of media, some traditional, some contemporary. In Farrell Racette’s curatorial statement, she describes “the emergence of a contemporary movement grounded in Indigenous values, aesthetic sensibilities and conceptual frameworks.”

Rice’s current series, Idol Wild, featuring aboriginal role models painted on lunch boxes, is on display in the FOFA vitrines. He is very conscious of how the traditional and contemporary jostle each other in aboriginal art, and in public perceptions of that work.

“There is often a narrative woven into these pieces. It becomes clear when you provide info on the work,” though he acknowledged that this is not often done in the art world.

Nadia Myre, a more recent Concordia graduate, thinks Izhizkawe is long overdue. “I grew up as a city kid in Montreal. My identity as a native woman came from my mom’s searching for her own past.”

Her mother’s discovery of her Algonquin background led Myre to bead the 56-page Indian Act, a project she completed in 2002. Cont(r)act turned into a collective project, with some people beading several pages, and other pages passing through dozens of hands at beading bees and other public events. Myre was conscious of the fact that the final piece did not reflect the reasons individuals participated.

Her current work, The Scar Project, allows people to use canvas and thread to manifest the scars they carry, and then write about them (www.nadiamyre.com/scarproject/).

“I wanted to develop a work around what we share in common. We all have stories that are painful and that mark us,” Myre said.

She considers the work to be connected to her First Nations ancestry, “but more global than that.” It is a path that Rice shares, when he considers his place as an aboriginal artist. “It’s the grounding of where I come from. But it grows larger to include a global perspective.”

That path with its strengths and contradictions, is central to Izhizkawe. Those who want to contribute to The Scar Project are invited to participate from 2 to 4 p.m. on June 12. A panel discussion with some of the artists will take place in the amphitheatre opposite the gallery at 6 p.m. the same day.