BONNIE DEVINE: ELEMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
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"Writing Home"
Bonnie Devine, "Writing Home," installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens
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"Writing Home"
Bonnie Devine, "Writing Home," installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens.
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"Writing Home"
Bonnie Devine, "Writing Home," installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens
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"Writing Home"
Bonnie Devine, "Writing Home," installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens
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"Writing Home"
Bonnie Devine, "Writing Home," installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens
BONNIE DEVINE: Elemental Geography
Bonnie Devine: Writing Home, February 12 to March 27, 2010, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg.
BY: Marlene Milne
The genesis of Bonnie Devine’s exhibition is a journey that begins on October, 2007 at the Art Gallery of Sudbury, where, as curator, she has just launched Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective Exhibition. The show will tour Canada and into the U.S., arriving at the National Gallery of Canada in late fall, 2009. But curating this show has renewed the creative urge in Bonnie Devine, the artist.
After opening the Daphne Odjig show, Devine returned to her childhood home in Serpent River in northern Ontario, where she hoped to transmit the energy that permeates the place, the result of an eons-old cataclysmic collision of tectonic plates, which gave birth to Laurentia, the Canadian Shield — the ancient home of the Ojibwa.
The site had given her inspiration before. Devine’s video in collaboration with Rebecca Garrett, Rooster Rock: the Story of Serpent River, won the award for best experimental film at the 2002 Toronto ImagineNATIVE film festival. In Stories from the Shield, at the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario in 2004, Devine identified several ongoing themes — “land and identity, memory and history, and the recovery and reclamation of a decolonized self” which she identified in her exhibition catalogue.
Using traditional and non-traditional media, she created provocative commentary on the plight of the region, fusing academic perspectives with personal experience and knowledge of Anishnabe craft, practice, spirituality, and mythology. On film, she projected the impact of mining in the region in the 1950s, prospectors probing and picking, and geologists searching for uranium, digging up the land and leaving pollution and devastating radiation behind. The exhibition used paper — sewn, threaded, strewn with text, crumpled, sculpted into a giant canoe, sketched in a folio form, tinted with tar and colours reflecting ancient ground pigments (ochre, madder, cobalt) — to deliver the message.
On her return to Serpent River, Devine greeted the land, placed tobacco, and started working.
Curated by Faye Heavyshield, Writing Home is composed of four groups. Viewers first gravitate to the loop of 58 slides documenting the site, with close-up portraits of the rocks and her photographs of her process. The photography documents and provides a narrative base for the work, and it also reflects historical layers. The Rock endures, supporting plants and lichens that, on intimate view, reveal animate shapes and scribbles that look like writing. The images are electric blue, ochre, rust, shades of amethyst, deep black, and jade.
Devine slowly reveals the story of this ancient land through four diptychs in two sizes — prints of slide details are juxtaposed with print texts, each a letter from the artist to an individual character (L, S, W, G) connected by red and grey threads of thought. The prints are rich in depth and hue, almost tactile, and differ from the slides in both colour and process, emphasizing the shifts in perspective and perception.
Transitions between the elements are fugue-like. The photos link, the texts counterpoint, some tie together literally in stitches, and others in handwritten graphite descriptions and transcriptions. In the Urban Shaman gallery, four freestanding birch plinths are lit from directly above, with a centered rectangular hollow balanced with a thick tablet-like glass cast. Viewed from below, they glow.
In the most poignant section of Writing Home, Devine handwrites letters to M, on crinkled paper.
B to M “You ask what I have been doing ... wetting paper drying on rock to see what the rock is writing…the pieces are thin, fragile, pictures of the rock’s “face”
M to B “What will they sound like? ...”
M to B “Thinking about water and wet paper…will the river accept them, will the rocks?
How strong and fragile will they be?”
B to M “Left marks on the rocks where I tried to take impressions. Forgive me Excuse me Forgive me”
Co-presented at Urban Shaman with Writing Home, musician, film-maker, and writer John Hupfield’s Becoming Unwritten flows alongside. Its mix of digital video and animation reaches back into time to tell Anishnabe stories, retrieve memories, and represent the land.
Rocks have stories to tell, as geologists and Bonnie Devine know. Stories are also told in birchbark and petroglyphs, letters and treaties, tailings and threads. In both of these exhibitions, the artists are on the same page — trying to find the right natural voices to tell these tales. The artists transmit a sense of loss and recovery, but their footprints through time stride among contemporary media to affirm, assert, and ask questions.
