“INSURGENCE/ RESURGENCE”

In past decades, group shows have asked us to reconsider Indigenous art, which too often has been marginalized and misunderstood. “INSURGENCE/ RESURGENCE”, an extensive, important and conceptually ambitious exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), goes way past that preliminary approach, asking us instead to reconsider Canada—its contested past, difficult present and possible futures.

The curatorial vision of Julie Nagam, of Métis, German and Syrian ancestry, and Jaimie Isaac, of Anishinaabe heritage from Sagkeeng First Nation, is powerful but never overbearing. “INSURGENCE/ RESURGENCE” conveys a very specific sense of 29 individual artists, who come from territories and communities across Canada, and of their wide-ranging practices, which include painting and sculpture, installation, intermedia, video and audio works, even a functioning tattoo studio.

At the same time, Isaac and Nagam effectively place these artists into a larger, contextualizing framework, situating their work within centuries of Indigenous history, pre- and post-contact; within lines of knowledge that connect traditional understanding to current technologies; and within the institutional assumptions and structures of the art world itself. The exhibition also asks viewers to examine their own positions (in my case, white, urban, middle-class, Scottish-Canadian), to consider where they stand and what they bring with them when encountering this work.

The radical reconsideration required by the show starts with the WAG building itself. Completed in 1971, the structure carries in its cool, beautiful bones the modernist ideal of the gallery as a neutral white box, in which art objects are removed from the mess and murk of power and politics. “INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE” reminds us that the WAG rests on Treaty 1 territory and the heartland of the Métis Nation, on top of fraught layers of colonial history. The show’s works not only wend and weave across 17,000 square feet of exhibition areas. They also move outside the conventionally defined borders of the gallery, popping up in unexpected corners, moving out onto exterior walls, disrupting clean architectural vistas. On top of each piece’s individual meaning, these works, taken together, are about occupying, negotiating and transforming physical space and institutional norms.

Take Winnipeg-based artist Kenneth Lavallee’s Creation Story, an arresting image unfurled onto the WAG’s exterior limestone face—taking the place of the usual banner announcing a blockbuster show—and continued on a ramp around the corner. Lavallee’s graphically gorgeous undulating blue waves reference Manitoba’s floods, both real and mythical, while the image’s peeking-out orb— according to the artist—suggests the torch of the Golden Boy, the figure that tops the dome of the nearby Manitoba Legislative Building. Connecting the WAG to the city spaces around it, the work seems to eye the Hudson’s Bay store across the boulevard, reminding us of that company’s complicated historical relationship with Canada’s First Peoples. It reframes the magisterial view down to the Legislative Building, zooming past that solid, stodgy statue of Queen Victoria and heading straight for the Golden Boy, a Greco-Roman Hermes figure that Lavallee has reclaimed as a half-spirit, half-human Métis trickster.

Inside the building, Kent Monkman takes on the WAG’s massive, echoing entry hall with a painting that is both a pointed restatement and sly satirical skewering of the kind of largescale, big-impact pieces that often hang there. Known for his canny, queered-up reworkings of the academic tradition, the Swampy Cree artist brings the tropes of history painting to the very contemporary street corners of Winnipeg’s North End. In Death of the Female, Monkman mixes up the urgent social, economic and cultural issues of the urban rez with references to Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso. Connecting modernism’s flattening out of the picture plane with mainstream history’s flattening out of Indigenous cultures, Monkman shows how these tensions are often worked out through the martyred bodies of women. Calling up the communal tragedy of Manitoba’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, he parallels a contorted Cubist female form with an act of real violence.

Along the routes to the main exhibition area, the work of Joi T Arcand inserts itself into the WAG’s central stairway, elevator doors and gallery entryway. A photo-based and multimedia artist from Saskatchewan’s Muskeg Lake Cree Nation who is currently based in Ottawa, Arcand uses gold vinyl transfers and LED and neon lights to construct works from the syllabics of the Cree language. Ēkāwiya ākayāsimo (Don’t Speak English) and ninohtē-nēhiwayā function as public, material acts of mourning for the traumatic stripping away of language and culture in the residential school system.

There is so much more in this packed exhibition. Many artists create hybrid objects that combine time-tested cultural forms with contemporary technology, traditional Indigenous storytelling with sudden, 21st-century twists. Two-spirited Métis, Salteaux and Polish artist Dayna Danger’s beaded bondage masks fuse historical craft with the sexy, dark armour of kink. Couzyn Van Heuvelen’s razor-precise minimalist objects, which reference hunting and fishing implements, play around with notions of fabrication and materiality. The Inuk sculptor, born in Iqaluit and currently living in southern Ontario, constructs seemingly natural materials through 3D scanning, while rendering machine objects in muskox horn. Scott Benesiinaabandan’s Animikiikaa 10/97 is both cutting-edge and primal, using audio technology to generate a profoundly physical experience of darkness, sound and the power of the mother tongue.

Several of the show’s artists deal with Identity, often rooted in connections to the land and relationships with family and community, but also mediated through pop culture and mass media. Dee Barsy uses colour-saturated geometric shapes to create painted forms that simultaneously abstract and embody her four grandmothers, adopted and biological. Mi’kmaw artist Ursula Johnson examines self-image for the social media generation, referencing the historical misuse of female Indigenous bodies by the fashion industry, by advertising and by film and television, while claiming her own body with self-generated photographic images and words from mentors and role models.

Amanda Strong turns issues of urban land use and resource management into an evocative, emotional journey. Using the uncanny and slightly obsessive beauty of stop-motion animation and old-school “supermarionation,” she tracks a punky, young, gender-non-binary Anishinaabe person on a quest for birch sap in the big city. In After the Next Ice Age in Long Plain Rez, Linus Woods recasts a potential environmental disaster as an exuberant utopian dream of paint, colour and motion, imagining a basically landlocked Manitoba First Nation regenerated as a surfing paradise.

There is no single systematic manifesto ordering this show. Instead, Nagam and Isaac layer their artists’ overlapping ideas and shared visions—as well as their divergences and differences—to speak powerfully to the still unfinished project of truth and reconciliation in Canada. Like all statement-making, paradigm-shifting group exhibitions, “INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE” features strong works that are even stronger together. ❚

“INSURGENCE/RESURGENCE” is on exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from September 23, 2017, to April 22, 2018.

Alison Gillmor is the pop culture columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and writes regularly on visual arts and film.