"Animal Spirit": Art Gallery of St. Albert, Alberta, July 25 to September 7, 2013

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Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

"Rainbow Bear"

Terry McCue, "Rainbow Bear," 2008, oil on canvas, 30” x 30”.

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Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

"Aniti Anemos"

Aaron Paquette, "Aniti Anemos," 2007, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 36” x 48”.

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Animal Spirit

Art Gallery of St. Albert, Alberta

July 25 to Sept. 7, 2013

By Agnieszka Matejko

“I am of the age that I am an Indian,” Terry McCue, a self-taught Ojibwe artist, tells me at the opening of Animal Spirit, which coincides with the Alberta Indigenous Games in St. Albert. “I was born an Indian and I will die an Indian.”

            McCue, 68, is a tall, distinguished-looking man with a calm demeanour. We sit in a quiet corner to discuss the exhibition’s theme: animal symbolism in aboriginal culture. He describes a great council held by the Ojibwe before the arrival of Europeans. “They talked about the things that were important in the world, and what they came to was that the least important element in creation were humans.” Yet, according to this story, humans are also powerful and have the capacity to overrun the world – to kill everything that isn’t human.

            It’s a teaching that McCue brings to his art. The animals in his paintings seem almost human and eerily evoke ancestral blurring of the boundaries between human and animal worlds. For instance, Rainbow Bear is an eye-level bear head that comes face to face with the viewer. On its neck, almost hidden amidst the fur, hovers a cryptic symbol of its spirit.

            In stark contrast to biblical perspectives, the aboriginal cultures represented in this show, selected from the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, view humans as merely a thread in nature’s tapestry. For instance, in Aniti Anemos, which means breath and wind, Aaron Paquette, a younger artist of mixed Cree and Cherokee descent, depicts a human face inside the head of a wolf. “My work almost always features an animal totem, or aspect of nature,” he says, explaining this emphasizes human relationships with both physical and spiritual worlds.

            The profoundly symbolic role of animals is also evident in the foundation’s broader aboriginal collection. Animal motifs, while not predominant, permeate work by all generations of indigenous artists. That includes the late Joane Cardinal-Schubert, a senior Blackfoot artist who provided curatorial input in 2008 and 2009 and enriched the foundation’s collection by adding new media work and numerous pieces by emerging artists.

            Tragically, she died in 2009 before the first exhibition of the newly expanded collection. However, the legacy of her mentorship of emerging artists, her countless studio visits, and, ultimately, the acquisitions in the foundation’s collection, continues to grow in renown. The Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Calgary – among others – have hosted major shows selected from the aboriginal collection. This exhibition, which also includes work by Cardinal-Schubert, Jason Carter and Erik Lee Christophersen, is simply the latest to express the remarkable quality and unique cultural identity of various generations of aboriginal artists in Alberta.