BONNIE DEVINE

Aanii, Hello. My name is Bonnie Devine. I descend from the Ojibway of the Serpent River First Nation in Northern Ontario. We are a small reserve on the north shore of Lake Huron, ceded by the Robinson Huron Treaty in 1850, bisected by the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1860’s and again by the Trans Canada Highway a decade after that. When I was small we called it B.C. (Behind Cutler), a whistle stop on the shipping run from Sault Ste Marie to Sudbury. I have lived most of my life in Toronto, but my cultural roots in Serpent River are strong and inform through narrative, image and instinct, all of my work - my visual art, my writing, my video experimentation and my curatorial aspirations.

I graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 and received a Master of Fine Art degree from York University in 1999. My specialty at both institutions was sculpture and installation. Since graduation, my writing, drawing, installation and new media work have been published and exhibited in Canada, the USA, South America and Russia. It has been an eventful and educational ten years.

STORIES FROM THE SHIELD

While I was in grad school at York University, I began researching the mining industry in Ontario, specifically the uranium mining in and around Elliot Lake, on the Serpent River watershed in what used to be my family’s trapping and hunting ground. In 1999 I completed a series of 78 drawings based on this subject called Radiation and Radiance and later collaborated with fellow artist Rebecca Garrett to turn my drawings into a thirty-minute video called Rooster Rock, the Story of Serpent River. In 2003, facing an exhibition deadline and under the influence of a spellbinding dream, I assembled my old thesis notes into a 16-foot Algonkian canoe, stitched together by Singer sewing machine, based on the transcribed methodology of William Commanda. It was an experiment I suppose, for I had no idea if the paper would support its own weight much less stand up to the stress the traditional design demanded. It did, and I untangled in the process the complex knot of my life’s inspiration. I am interested in, no; better say in thrall of, the histories and technologies of the Great Anishnabek. It seems almost clichéd to write it now, but then it was a revelation, so buried and abject, it seemed to me, were the customs and stories of our people. In 2003 and 2004 I showed the canoe and drawings in a solo exhibition called Stories from the Shield, which travelled from Sault Ste Marie to Winnipeg to Manitoulin Island to Sudbury to Brantford and finally to Toronto.

All very well you say, but isn’t this essay supposed to be a curatorial profile? Why did you, an artist, decide to curate? Why turn your focus to another artist’s work? And where did you learn to curate anyway?

Of course there are many of us in the Aboriginal community who have made the transition from artist to curator and back again. Each has her motivation and trajectory, but to answer these not so rhetorical questions for my own part, I will have to tell you a story.

THE DAPHNE ODJIG PROJECT

In 2004 I was commissioned by Native Earth Performing Arts to design the set and costumes for a play about the life and work of the great Algonkian painter Daphne Odjig. For ”The Art Show”, written by Alanis King, I used excerpted scenes from Odjig’s paintings as movable, sometimes wearable backdrops for a series of vignettes about her life and the development of her career. In preparation for the assignment, I travelled to Penticton B.C. (not Behind Cutler) to meet Ms. Odjig with Jani Lauzon, who played Daphne in the production. It was a turning point in my career. We sat in Daphne’s living room and listened as she talked about the old days in Wikwemikong, Parry Sound and Toronto. Surrounded by her paintings, she described her life as an artist, a mother and a Native woman making her way in the wilds of racist Canada. I realized only gradually that here was an exhibition that needed showing. Daphne Odjig, recipient of the Order of Canada, last had a retrospective exhibition of her paintings in 1985. Organized by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the show travelled to Laurentian University Art Gallery in Sudbury, the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg and the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford - four venues in Ontario. Though she took part in a landmark group exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1972, “Treaty Numbers 23, 287, 1171” and is well represented in commercial galleries across the country, she has not had a solo exhibition in a public art gallery outside of Ontario since 1971. As Daphne spoke about the five distinct styles she has at different times employed in her work I began to dimly see a thematic arc stretching across five decades of our history and three thousand miles of this country. I resolved quietly, to myself, to help organize a long overdue retrospective exhibition of this great Canadian artist’s work.

Things don’t always work out as planned. In scouting around for a potential curator for this potential exhibition it was suggested to me by various friends and advisors, (who shall remain nameless) that I might be the one to curate it. It is not the first time the bright ideas of others have got me in hot water. My curatorial dossier was rather thin at the time. I had curatorial credit for “ThinSkinned”, a group exhibition at A Space Gallery in Toronto in 2002 that included the paintings of Kent Monkman and four other emerging Toronto artists; and “Neebing Nugushkeewauding”, the City of Toronto’s first annual First Nations art exhibition at Toronto City Hall in 1996, an event organized under the auspices of the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (ANDPVA). Included in this exhibition were Rebecca Baird, Rebecca Belmore, Michael Belmore, Philip Coté, Al Goulais, Robert Houle, Bev Koski, Norval Morrisseau, Frank Shebageget and others. It was an auspicious start but additional curatorial gigs were hard to find. My critical writing was beginning to find an audience though, and McClelland and Stewart, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Eiteljorg Foundation, among others, had commissioned and published my essays on art and artists.

I had studied curatorial practice with great interest at art school, where the issues of representation and voice that systemically divide the museum and the First Peoples resonated with my own experiences as an outsider in my own land and inspired me to try to find new ways to “read and be red” in an institutional setting.

I began to wonder if the Daphne Odjig Exhibition might not turn out to be just a sweet fantasy when instead of a curator I found a partner in the indomitable Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of Sudbury. Celeste Scopelites heard me theorize about a retrospective exhibition of Daphne Odjig’s paintings in 2004 and said, “Let’s do it!” The Canada Council for the Arts read my independent curatorial research grant application and said “ Go ahead and do it!” I wrote a letter to Daphne telling her about the project and she said, “You go girl!”

I took the project on. I began to research Daphne’s life and the lives of other artists working in the 1960’s and 70’s, the origins of the Woodland School and beyond that to the great teaching rocks and scrolls of the Anishnabek. I found a way back in this work to the river on the Trans Canada highway and my roots in the narrative traditions of the Serpent River Ojibway. I found a way forward to an investigation of North American modernism and its connection to the pictorial traditions born here on the Canadian Shield.

THE DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS
OF DAPHNE ODJIG:
A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION

Being excerpts from the curatorial statement accompanying the proposal to the National Gallery of Canada :

The curator’s voice (ahem)

In bringing together 40 years of Daphne Odjig’s paintings and drawings, this retrospective exhibition facilitates a long overdue critical assessment of Daphne Odjig’s extensive aesthetic, philosophical and cultural investigations during the last decades of the twentieth century. Examples of her contribution to the early Woodland School are contrasted with the lyricism of her colour work in the 1980’s and the sharp political content of her large history paintings. The years within which these works were created represent a complex watershed in the cultural and political history of the First Nations in Canada. Odjig’s experimentation with numerous genres and styles and her determination to give voice to a particular political reality, make her an uncommon vehicle for an examination of our country and ourselves. Moreover, the assembling of First Nations writers and artists to write to this work in the exhibition catalogue allows at last for a culturally cohesive positioning of the work within a critical discourse that is based on the traditions of the Anishnabek. We believe this last component of the project to be of signal importance in the development of a truly mature Canadian cultural identity.

A Question of Place

Daphne Odjig was born in Wikwemikong, on Manitoulin Island, in the province of Ontario. The Manitoulin Island Unceded Indian Reserve is on the eastern tail of Manitoulin Island, separated from the main body of the island by a narrow neck of land two miles wide. Bounded by Manitowaning Bay to the north and South Bay to the south it is an enormous reserve, some 165 square miles in area. The treaty in 1862 and the Indian Act in 1876 codified Wikwemikong as its principal village. Though unceded, the territory is nevertheless subject to the Indian Act, a legal peccadillo that is at the root of the long tradition of rancor. The village is significant however for more than its unusual constitutional status, for Wikwemikong is acknowledged as the cultural heart and spiritual core of the Anishnabek in Central Ontario.

A Question of Memory

Odjig attended the Jesuit school in Wikwemikong until the eighth grade, when serious illness cut short her formal education. The stories as much as the linear graphic style she learned from her stone carver grandfather during her long convalescence influenced Odjig’s aesthetic and metaphysical concerns throughout her long career. In the 1960’s, simultaneously and apparently unknown to each other, Daphne Odjig and Norval Morrisseau began to develop a “new” mode of painting, an apparently spontaneous expression of cultural consciousness characterized at the time as an “Emergence.” As if miraculously appearing out of nowhere, the unexpected resurrection of a culture considered to be long dead provided a living for several artists and a good many nimble art dealers and cultural critics for several years. Yet even the most cursory research will reveal the ancient source of this imagery and pictorial tradition. The metaphysics and philosophy of the Algonkian peoples of the Canadian Shield are inscribed everywhere on this region’s rocky face. Despite the best efforts of colonialism, the culture has endured.

The exhibition, consisting of 63 works spanning forty years of Daphne Odjig’s career is scheduled to open at the Art Gallery of Sudbury on September 15, 2007 and continue to November 11, 2007. A tour to public galleries across Canada will follow.

WITNESS: THE ART OF DAPHNE ODJIG
A SYMPOSIUM

As I was writing, reading and gathering the components for the Odjig exhibition I began to wonder if it wasn’t about time that we got together to talk about these matters among ourselves and to ourselves… in order to take ownership, in order to historicize, in order to celebrate. The idea of a symposium was born.

Sudbury Ontario
October 12, 13, 14, 2007

Do you, like me, think it is time to open up a critical dialogue on the Woodland School’s place in the context of post-colonial or neo-colonial discourse? To bring those who first broke ground together with those who are finding new ground, to meet and reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going?

The intention of the symposium is to facilitate a critical examination of the Woodland School Painters by Anishnabe, Algonkian and other Aboriginal thinkers. I believe a primary focus of our discussions will be to recount (and account for) the re-emergence of the ancient Algonkian pictorial tradition in the region of the Canadian Shield in the mid Twentieth century. Another significant issue to be explored is the continuing influence of the Woodland Painters on the philosophical and aesthetic development of First Nations art practice in Ontario and abroad - an historical and critical locating of our traditions whether within Modernist and Post Modernist, Colonial and Neo Colonial discourses - or outside them. Most importantly, a fundamental goal is to create a forum for the sharing and exchange of current practices, new directions in curatorial and critical issues, obstacles and developments, recognizing that the opportunities for Aboriginal artistic expression in all media are expanding dramatically. Finally, our discussions will be directed toward the creation of a discursive text, a scholarly document, written from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective, spoken in a contemporary Aboriginal voice.

The Woodlands School has become an iconic art form in Canada and as such has moved into a cultural realm that tends to place it beyond question or criticism. Our premise, that the Woodland School Painters were working within an established aesthetic tradition which is unique to the land from which it emerged will form the basis of our gathering and for this reason we expect to enjoy an atmosphere of celebration as well as a spirit of serious enquiry. The three-day symposium will take place in mid October, commencing on Thursday night October 11, 2007, with a formal reception for the Daphne Odjig Retrospective Exhibition and continuing until noon on Sunday October 14, 2007.

Invitations will be extended to Miss Odjig and her family in British Columbia and Ontario. Artists, writers and scholars (both written and oral) are invited to submit proposals for presentations, papers, panel discussions and round table debate.

A call for papers will be posted on line shortly. Further details will be published as they are finalized. Preliminary enquiries or comments can be addressed to nenobi@hotmail.com

Thank you, Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, for inviting me to share my perspective on the curatorial process. It is an honour.

Chi Miigwetch

Bonnie Devine