Negotiating any identity in world that is evermore globalized and homogenized can be a tricky business at best. Compound that with an identity that is in direct (or even remotely adjacent) contrast to the globalized majority and you run the risk of negotiating yourself into a tight spot. Context is everything when it comes to fully (or partially) realizing another’s culture, and most audiences’ attention spans haven’t the time for things like context. Therein lays the proverbial rub.

It is with this in mind, that NAICA attended the 8^th annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Festival in the hopes that we would get a good dose of context in which to begin another year of curatorial internet madness. And really, for the most part, I would say we were not to be disappointed. imagineNATIVE has always (as far as I know) included a Fine Art component in their programming that not only lends itself to compliment the larger media festival, but adds a precious dose of cultural context that so many of us need to have a decent world view. Plus, as we all know, those seats in the Al Green Theatre are less than comfy, so it is nice to get off one’s ass and go look at some art.

So let’s talk about the art this year. In a co-curated exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) entitled Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers, curators Candice Hopkins and Kerry Swanson created a beautifully esoteric exhibition combining works of contemporary indigenous artists and filmmakers with a few samplings of traditional native objects, such as an Iroquois wampum bag and an engraved prehistoric mammoth tusk from Alaska. “Beautifully esoteric” are deliberate word choices on my part (not to insinuate that most of my words choices aren’t deliberate…) because the exhibition was truly beautiful and well crafted as far as choice of contemporary artists and their work, but esoteric even more so, mainly for the decision to include these few traditional objects from the ROM’s “cultural” collection with an almost arbitrary flair. I don’t want to equate it to that “primitive” art exhibition scandal in New York many years back (at which museum now escapes me) in which the curators exhibited artists like Picasso alongside categorically de-contextualized African and South Pacific carvings. But… then again, I must compare in that way simply because that is what came to mind when viewing these traditional objects in the larger context of contemporary indigenous based art. As an objective viewer, I simply had no idea what they were doing there.

I know that historically, the ROM has had a somewhat spotty reputation (on par with the Smithsonian here in the States) for exhibiting indigenous-made objects in an anthropologically patronizing way, and that the curators of this exhibition, in part, desired to display these objects, contemporary and traditional, side-by-side in order to weave a dialogue of past and present indigenous identities. The problem was that instead of a time-traveling, shape shifting dialogue, you simply had a wonderfully curated contemporary indigenous art exhibit with a random sampling of anthropological tidbits. There was no talking between the contemporary and the traditional. They were like silent strangers, awkwardly crowded together on a subway car.

The curation of contemporary work was pretty much spot on though (aside from the exhibition space being a little weird), and I wish that these pieces (from artists such as Kent Monkman, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Brian Jungen, Isuma Productions and the wonderful Alan Michelson) had been left to stand alone, on their own merits and on their own strengths as pieces of powerful storytelling. It wasn’t that the traditional objects took away from the exhibition necessarily; it was more that they didn’t add anything to it. And certainly these objects did not give the viewer the dose of context that I believe the curators were going for.

I digress though, because what I really wanted to talk about were the contemporary pieces, as that is what I believe imagineNATIVE does best; contextualize contemporary indigenous artists for a broader audience. There are plenty of great pieces to mention, but I will stick with my favorites, the ones I spent the most time with, and refer the reader to the podcast (below) between myself and Maria Colon, for further information and opinions on the exhibit in full.

First I have to mention the piece by Brian Jungen, Cetology, a 40 foot sculpture of a whale skeleton made out of plastic lawn chair parts. It was suspended from the ceiling by wires, like a dinosaur in a natural history museum. I mention this piece first simply because it visually dominated the exhibit, and also because I feel it did more to set the stage for dialogue between past and present than say, the wampum wallet or the mammoth tusk. It also challenged the viewer to look past the obvious contexts of contemporary objects (read: plastic lawn chairs) and anthropological references (read: natural history lookin’ skeleton) and determine the fragile space between the two. That fragile space is exactly the space contemporary indigenous artists must negotiate.

Another great example this carefully negotiated space: a piece by Faye HeavyShield, entitled hours, which was small, white book, whose pages were completely constructed out of seed beads. I don’t need to mention the correlation between traditionally exhibited Indian beaded objects and HeavyShield’s piece, but I will mention it simply for the fact, that yet again, this contemporary work did not need no wampum wallet to contextualize it for the audience. It spoke for itself.

Other great pieces were an installation by Nadia Myre, The Dreamers, which was a sprawling sculpture with spears and traditional Innu fishing nets, a 13-part video installation Nunavut (Our Land) by the beloved Kunuk and Cohn of Isuma Productions, and three mixed media objets d’art by the imitable Kent Monkman, who despite his tendencies to be extravagant for the sake of being extravagant, does a damn good job of negotiating the fragile space mentioned above. Not to mention he’s openly gay, which adds a whole other ingredient to the identity pot. But my favorite work by far was Light After Darkness, a video triptych by US artist, Alan Michelson. With titles (and an artist’s statement) taken from a melodramatic 1907 quote by Edward Curtis, Michelson paints a digital portrait of an ever-changing contemporary indigenous landscape. These three real time videos of urban skylines, displayed in gold frames like Remington landscapes, moved slowly from daylight to dusk, deluminating the industrialized cities of Ontario. All they needed to contextualize them was an incongruously gleaned quote from the Great Father of Indian Portraiture:

Alone with my campfire, I gaze about on the completely circling hill-top, crested with countless campfires, around which are gathered the people of a dying race. The gloom of the approaching night wraps itself about me. I feel that the life of these children of nature is like the dying day drawing to its end; only off in the West is the glorious light of the setting sun, telling us, perhaps, of light after darkness.

Edward S. Curtis, 1907.

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