Brenda Draney: Drink from the River

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Brenda Draney, “Accord,” 2021, oil on canvas (photo by Charles Cousins, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta)

Brenda Draney’s painting exhibition, Drink from the river, at the Art Gallery of Alberta delves deeply in to the politics of personal and collective memory. Organized and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, the show includes paintings made between 2013 and 2024 of moments recalled from the artist’s lived experience and personal archive. 

A member of the Sawridge First Nation (Treaty 8), Draney lives in Edmonton but grew up in Slave Lake, Alta., where she still has strong ties. Her subjects would be familiar to anyone who has spent time in a small town — a basement party, a dented Honda Accord, target practice, people drinking beer. 

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Brenda Draney, “Strange Invitation,” 2020, oil on canvas (photo by Charles Cousins, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta)

Draney’s personal memories relate to larger social issues of mass displacement and systemic inequality in a series of tent paintings she started around the time of the Slave Lake wildfire. The tents are abstracted, withholding as much as they represent. In Tent City (2010), for instance, a large part of the foreground has been painted out. It is unclear what is missing or why. Strange Invitation (2020) makes the issue more explicit. A reclining male figure, his rendered face in shadow, meets our gaze, encouraging us to consider the ethics of representing society’s most vulnerable. 

Draney paints her subjects from memory. They are stripped back to their essentials and often ambiguously rendered. What she can’t remember, she leaves blank. She builds visual and psychological tension between the flat, broad, sketchy brushstrokes she uses to paint her subjects and the negative space that defines them. The empty space surrounding the figures in both Dart and Nap (both 2017) creates a sense of isolation and vulnerability, even potential violence, as amplified by the bruises in Legs (2022). Vulnerability, this time resulting from systemic failure, is also alluded to in the hospital room scene Theatre (2019). It’s an alienating landscape where the figure’s absence is uncannily present in the ruffled bed, indented pillows, and bed sore pads, but their welfare remains unknown. 

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Brenda Draney, “Tent City,” 2010, oil on canvas (photo by Charles Cousins, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta)

Draney tries to be true to her subjects, refusing to represent anything that she cannot remember from her lived experience. But memory is unreliable. Individual and collective memory intertwine. One memory can easily supplant another to become the dominant narrative. In Self-Portrait (2022) Draney pictures herself as a child seated on a floral-patterned sofa, one that was mass-marketed to middle-class families into the 1960s and still lingers in basements and thrift stores. Its decorative pattern derives from Colonial Revival design and is nostalgic for some. But Grandma’s couch is not so comforting in Draney’s recollection. It takes up most of the space in this small painting, visually competing with the figure of the child for our attention. It is more vividly recalled than the figure. In hindsight, it signals the insidiousness ways in which social constructs, in this case colonialism and inequity, shape our realities and become normalized, often without us even knowing it. 

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Brenda Draney, “Self Portrait,” 2022, oil on canvas (photo by Charles Cousins, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta)

The pattern repeats in A Basement Party (2022) and Visit (2021). Draney roughly outlines the situation in both paintings. In Visit, two roughly blocked in uniformed figures occupy an empty space beside a partially rendered wood-panelled room where a figure sits on the floral couch. She uses the negative space to disrupt and compartmentalize each scene. Much remains ambiguous or unarticulated, hidden or repressed. This creates narrative tension, suspending us in a state of uncertainty between knowing and not knowing. We have the desire to know more, and Draney encourages us to join in a reciprocal relationship with the paintings’ subjects and fill in the narrative gaps from our own experiences. 

Draney’s paintings create a space of relations that reveal to us what we think we know and how we have come to know it. Sometimes she catches us in our assumptions. One barely needs to glance at the reclining female figures in Rest (2021) and Dodge (2023) before recognizing them. But these are not those odalisques. Roughly contoured in dry raw umber paint smears and ill-defined in putrid flesh tones, Rest (2021) and Dodge (2023) represent the exhaustion and violence wrought upon the culture by patriarchal colonialism, a social construction perpetuated by representations with very real effects. Drink from the river is both an invitation and a warning. Representation has the power to both nourish us and make us sick. ■

Brenda Draney's new exhibition, Drink from the river, is on view at Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton through May 5.

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