Boarder Art Catches a Wave in Winnipeg

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In the mid-90s, my brother plastered a sticker to the back window of our family station wagon that read: “Skateboarding Is Not A Crime.”  His life had become a strange mixture of beauty and pain. He soared. He flew. But he also crashed to earth, breaking bone after bone.

For Jaimie Issac, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s curatorial resident of indigenous and contemporary art, the exhibitions cantchant, by Australian artist Vernon Ah Kee, and Boarder X, a group show with seven Canadian artists, grew out of profound appreciation for this kind of physical and spiritual tension. “I skateboard, snowboard and surf myself,” she says, “so I can easily recognize the importance of these sports for the artists. All eight artists use boards – literally and figuratively – to mobilize their own indigenous cultural knowledge.” As professional skateboarder Marc Johnson once said: “All skateboarding actually is, is putting ideas into action.”

Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His work forms an intensely emotional and hard-hitting critique of Australian culture. His sculptural surfboards depict traditional shield designs in the vivid yellows and reds of the Australian Aboriginal flag. On their flip sides, Ah Kee has drawn portraits of his family and ancestors. The boards respond to the 2005 race riots in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla, the history of exoticized portraiture, and the erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty.

Meghann O’Brien is a Haida-Kwakwaka’wakw-Irish textile artist and professional snowboarder. She specializes in Yeil Koowu (Raven's Tail) and Naaxiin (Chilkat) textiles. Both art and snowboarding deepen her connection with the natural world, be it through hand processing goat’s wool and cedar bark, or landing a jump amid a spray of snow. O’Brien’s textiles are finely woven yet imbued with bold, dynamic presence. When making these blankets, she writes on her blog, “we are making our stories real in the physical world … I hope it helps to bring about an old world that wants to live and breathe again.”

For Mark Igloliorte, skateboarding and art-making frequently intersect. In Boarder X, his paired videos usher traditions of his Inuit heritage into contemporary life. In the first, the artist performs a kickflip, a trick in which a skateboard spins 360 degrees. The second shows a flip in a kayak. Igliliorte has spoken philosophically about skateboarding – describing the danger, the triumph and the “transfer of energy” that can occur. Skateboarders see the city as a creative space that’s free of barriers, says Issac. “It’s about connection to terrain. It’s about claiming. It’s about occupancy.”

The other artists in Boarder X, which runs from Nov. 19 to April 23, are Jordan Bennett, Roger Crait, Steven Davies, Mason Mashon and Les Ramsay. For the opening, Issac was installing a half-pipe in the gallery’s lobby and inviting in local indigenous skateboarders. Hers is a prophetic vision, and an activist one: The gallery as a noisy, energy-filled skate park, free of limits and barriers, where obstacles are skated across or jumped over, open to all.

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