2024-04-01
Nelson White, “Good Dog,” 2023, oil on canvas, 60” X 48” (courtesy of Fogo Island Arts)
Nelson White: Community Concerns
Mi’kmaq artist Nelson White, a member of the Flat Bay First Nation Band, produces canvases awash in a bold, kinetic palette, through which he concerns himself with the connections and kinship of Indigenous people.
The artist’s current show, Wutanminu - Our Community, on view at Fogo Island Arts, on Fogo Island, N.L., until Nov. 30, features a mix of celebratory portraiture — doctors, lawyers, musicians and community leaders — and slices of everyday life: a pair of boys with a dog watching an out-of-frame television, a couple harnessing a dog team to a quad.
Each piece considers the complexity of representing someone both as they see themselves and how they are seen. Taken together, the collection serves as an insertion of Indigenous histories into the historically Western art form of portrait painting.
“Indigenous people tend to be seen in one light, and I paint people from my life who are cool, interesting, funky Indigenous people,” White told CBC in an interview last year. “People tend to come with preconceived notions about what Indigenous people are. Either that we're a people of the past, or a people of poverty, or a people who are only in regalia, feathers and those sort of things.”
With his art, White aims to change that.
Installation view of “Audie Murray: To Make Smoke,” 2024 (photo by Carey Shaw, courtesy of MacKenzie Art Gallery)
Audie Murray: The NEXT Act
Audie Murray says she defines herself as a process-oriented artist, meaning the end aesthetic isn’t the most important part of her work, but rather, it’s the “embodied feeling within my studio practice.”
By way of example, she points to the materials in a set of colour fields entitled Extractions, none of which are likely to be found on a trip to an art supply store: tobacco, rose petals and her own breast milk. All of these required time and labour on Murray’s part to grow or produce. Or, in the case of the bear grease employed in Bear Smudge, a performance for camera, it was bartered from fellow Indigenous people. (Murray is Cree-Métis from the Lebret and Meadow Lake communities located on Treaty 4 and 6 territories.)
These works are among the pieces featured in Audie Murray: To Make Smoke, on view at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina until Sept. 8. Curated by Tak Pham, the exhibition is the second installment in the gallery’s NEXT series, which aims to “highlight artistic innovation and support transformational pivots in fresh careers.”
According to the MacKenzie team, “Murray draws inspiration from the process of generating smoke, skillfully harnessing this volatile medium and other unconventional materials. Smoke, with its ephemeral nature, serves as a form of resistance against predatory exposure and reclaims the artist’s autonomy over the significance of her work.”
Subtle humour is at play throughout. Upon entering the gallery, one is invited to take a box of matches that comprises the installation Token Generosity. Embossed with “To Make Smoke” in Cree syllabics on the front, it holds a full set of matches, each of which has already been burnt.
Patrick Dunford, “Salvagers,” 2024, oil on canvas, 14" x 16" (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
Patrick Dunford: Nature will Prevail
Extraction also figures prominently in Patrick Dunford’s Branch Lines, on view at Norberg Hall in Calgary until April 20.
Featuring 14 oil-on-canvas works completed between 2019 and 2024 by the Manitoba-born, Indianapolis-based artist, the exhibition investigates human influences on the land and the industries that greatly alter it.
Appropriately, trains are a recurring motif in Dunford’s practice, both for the physical transformation of the natural environment necessitated by laying rail, hence the exhibition’s title, and for raw goods they transport (i.e. coal). In some pieces, though, this presence is merely implied, such as The Salvagers, which features two figures gathering scrap alongside a defunct rail line. We see but a few glimpses of them peeking through the overgrowth.
Elsewhere, we see an impromptu beach scene at the site of an abandoned quarry (Quarry Swimmers, 2024), a desert environment dotted with campers and trailers (Temporary Retirement Community, 2024), and a lone figure within a dense forest, with just a hint of human habitation visible through a gap in the brush (I’m Probably Running Away From The Thoughts Of The Day, 2023).
According to Norberg Hall, “Dunford’s paintings are not stereotypical landscapes, but rather paintings about place, place filled with the hope of nature’s powers of reclamation.” ■
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