Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal Artists
Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal Artists
January 18—March 10
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 at 8 p.m.
Talk/Tour: Friday, January 25 at 7 p.m., with co-curators Andrea Kunard and Steven Loft
Steeling the Gaze draws on the collection of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). The exhibition features profoundly symbolic works by some of Canada’s celebrated Indigenous artists. The exhibition showcases images of Aboriginal peoples created by 12 Aboriginal artists: KC Adams, Carl Beam, Dana Claxton, Thirza Cuthand, Rosalie Favell, Kent Monkman, David Neel, Shelley Niro, Arthur Renwick, Greg Staats, Jeff Thomas, and Bear Witness. Together, the 51 works send a powerful message on the evolution of Aboriginal self-determination in Canada.
This deeply reflective exhibition showcases the National Gallery’s significant collection of portraits by Indigenous artists, as well as other works from private collections. Steeling the Gaze includes portrait photographs as well as video installations, in an exploration of how contemporary Aboriginal artists have used the portrait as a means of self-expression, in spite of its long, problematic history for their peoples. “The portrait is a European convention that exerts control over the subject,” explains co-curator Andrea Kunard. “In the past, Aboriginal people were often objectified for commercial purposes. They were represented as a dying race doomed by the inexorable march of ‘civilization.’ Contrary to this portrayal, they have neither vanished nor died out; they survived.”
For many Aboriginal peoples, taking control of the camera and placing oneself or others within the photographic frame is a courageous and political act. In defiance of the history described by Kunard, contemporary Aboriginal artists now reconstruct the narrative of race; they self-determine the image that manifests the reality of Aboriginal culture. The exhibition’s other co-curator, Stephen Loft, who was NGC’s first Curator-in-Residence, Indigenous Art, states, “By reconstructing the narrative of race, [the artists in this exhibition] have captured the wide plurality of Aboriginal histories, cultures, and contemporary realities and have created their own visual identities.” This kind of artmaking is not about identity politics, it is the assertion of cultural sovereignty.
Steeling the Gaze is co-curated by Andrea Kunard (National Gallery of Canada) and Steven Loft (National Visiting Trudeau Fellow at Ryerson University).
Lecture by curator Steven Loft: “Culture Shock”
Lecture by curator Andrea Kunard: “In the Line of Sight”
Audio tour with artist Rosalie Favell
Audio tour with artist Arthur Renwick
Audio tour with artist Jeff Thomas
Stephen Hutchings: Landscapes for the End of Time
Steven Hutchings: Landscapes for the End of Time
January 18—March 10
Organized by the Glenbow Museum
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 at 8 p.m.
Talk/Tour: Sunday, January 27 at 2 p.m. with the artist, Stephen Hutchings
Musical Performance: Sunday, January 27 at 2:30 p.m.
Quartet for the End of Time, by Olivier Messiaen, performed by members of the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. Introduction by Stephen Hutchings.
This exhibition of immense landscape paintings by the Ottawa-based artist Stephen Hutchings is inspired by Quartet for the End of Time. The French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) created this piece of music with the Bible’s Book of Revelation in mind, while interned in a German prison camp during the Second World War. Whereas Messiaen’s musical composition literally accomplishes the end of time by separating rhythm from metre, Hutchings’ paintings do so by presenting landscapes that are severed from a connection to a particular time or place.
This exhibition acknowledges landscape as an active contemporary genre. It combines old-style photography with leading-edge computer design; it brings the huge scale of traditional history painting to the arena of landscape; it imbues the familiar with a sense of mystery and a heightened sense of consciousness; it shows how the objectifying power of technology, in this case the digital camera and the computer, can be subsumed by the subjective imperatives of mark-making and the human hand.
In the exhibition, Hutchings examines ideas of temporality, permanence and eternity. His evocative landscape paintings, resisting identification with any particular historical time or geographic place, hold their historical debts, contemporary explorations and timeless questions in one temporal moment: the present.
Stephen Hutchings: Landscapes for the End of Time has been organized and circulated by the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta.
Alison Norlen: LUNA
Alison Norlen: LUNA
January 25—March 10
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 at 8 p.m.
Talk/Tour: Sunday, February 3 at 2 p.m. with artist Alison Norlen
Alison Norlen: LUNA marks new creative territory for this Saskatoon artist. The intricate welded architecture in this installation elaborates upon the expansive drawings and wire maquettes that have characterized her artistic practice during the last decade. Here, she reconstitutes monumental, 20th-century sites of leisure, fantasy and cultural artifice, such as the Crystal Palace, Luna Park, Brighton Pier, and Las Vegas.
Sensational and fantastic spaces have inspired Norlen, from her early theme park sculptures and pinball landscapes, to her series of drawn “Floats,” with their tangled collisions of rural fairgrounds, roadside attractions, and construction sites. Norlen’s more recent engagements on paper feature monolithic structures like the Spanish fortress, Alhambra, or obsolete industrial sites. Her work is futuristic yet nostalgic. There are elements of the industrial and monumental, yet they are never robust or invincible. Rather, they are eroded to ephemeral, vulnerable traces.
LUNA is the most recent in Norlen’s series of spectacular, large-scale installations. The ghost-like surfaces of familiar and forgotten sites evoke theme parks, carnival forms and architectural follies. Fusing travelled spaces, autobiographical references, personal narration and metaphor, the large wire structures blur boundaries of the exotic and the everyday. The artist explores the effects of time and the persistence of memory within an intricate and layered narrative landscape.
Alison Norlen: LUNA is guest curated for the Mendel by Shauna McCabe.
Artists by Artists: Zachari Logan & Humboldt Magnussen
January 25 to March 10, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 at 8 p.m.
Humboldt Magnussen creates personal folk tales, layering themes of home, belonging, and survival. His hybrid characters function as surrogates, referencing people and places close to him, allowing him to explore elusive aspects of his own identity. Magnussen’s visual narratives include plant and animal life that reflect his experiences of growing up in rural Saskatchewan.
Magnussen is an Interdisciplinary Masters student at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He is co-founder of the Saskatoon queer arts festival, “Eat Your Art Out, Judy Garland,” and has exhibited his work nationally. His mentor, Zachari Logan, is a Saskatoon artist whose large-scale, detailed drawings have been included in group and solo exhibitions across the Americas and Europe.
