Let us be honest, if we dare: most Canadians are uninterested in Reconciliation.
Oh, sure, you can’t attend many events these days without the lip service “acknowledgements” but just as the “killers in high places say their prayers out loud”, this is just accommodating, even a bit shady (flavoured by hypocrisy) rhetoric.
Allow me to fully expose my Saskatchewan (like a skin rash, ahem) for a moment to illustrate this.
The current President of #usask is probably unable to visit the lavatory without making sure someone sees him doing a land acknowledgement. More relevantly, he also was Dean of Arts & Humanities when a significant – and well founded I found, when I spoke to those involved – complaint regarding the disrespect / dismissal / degradation of the sole tenured Indigenous faculty in the ‘art’ department. Even ‘better’, when some documents came to light re: departmental ‘self evaluation’ (delusion, ahem, some may say), it was disgusting if unsurprising to see one of Canada’s most groundbreaking Indigenous artists listed as ‘faculty’ when she’d not taught there in almost a decade, was a loud voice in the aforementioned smothered complaint, and had spoken often of her shabby treatment at the hands of those whom helped spawn this ‘report.’
This is a uniquely Canadian approach: polite, effete, yet just as firm. We don’t have a Sand Creek or Wounded Knee here, but perhaps someone might ask why the Catholic Cult in Canada gets a free pass on their genocidal alacrity in the Residential Schools?
Again, it is very Canadian to oppress through the rule of law rather than slaughter: Crazy Horse was murdered, but when Sitting Bull sought refuge in Canada, he and his people were starved into fleeing, as the bureaucracy (not being “Canadian Indians” they couldn’t be ‘supported’) offered genocide through ‘red tape’, if you will.
I must channel a friend and activist – and instigator that I so miss having on my old radio show – Marcel Petit, who would ask why any of these people – on all sides, as he was generous in his very experiential and factual condemnation of hypocrisy – would change a situation that benefits them. So, the distaste around Trudeau is not shock to many of us, and like many situations, the revolution will seem impossible until after it happens, and you can then see that it was inevitable. Only the form of it would be still defined, and that may also only be clear in hindsight, too.
But what has spurred this latest tangent? Well, I’ve been doing a writer’s residency in Welland, exploring history, place, space and how all these might manifest or be deformed through art, both in terms of the art in the public sphere here but with what contemporary creators are doing here / there now. In visiting the Welland Public Library, I came across the work of Brian Kon, who’s art I’ve encountered before (when Brock University along with a few other groups was marking Celebration of Nations last year) but like many things, it seemed to expand a thought I was having about larger issues outside the gallery space.
Kon‘s works can be found in the lower area of Welland’s City Hall space, as the building’s architecture acknowledges the slope on which it sits: one wall is designated as a ‘gallery’ space, and works are hung salon style here. In many ways this doesn’t serve the work: some are too high, and if there are similarities in work – as there is with Kon’s aesthetic, as he’s a Métis artist so pattern and repetition are cultural touchstones in the works here, as you may be familiar with from Christi Belcourt’s pieces – they can become wallpaper, which isn’t fair to the art or artists.
Kon presents ten works, all acrylic on canvas and most fairly uniform in size, if not alignment. The majority are on black backgrounds (Prairie Sky or Autumn’s Light) , but a striking work is on a reddish brown field (Echoes of Silence), and another is easily the focal point of all the pieces with its solid blue background (the above pictured Red River Summer).
The accompanying statement: As a Métis artist in the Niagara region, Brian hopes to raise awareness of Indigenous issues within Canada…[he] creates modern versions of bead patterns traditionally used by Métis to adorn their personal possessions and clothing. Using the quill end of a feather, Brian applies each “bead” to [canvas] as a single dot of paint. One of his works will, as of March 2019, be on display at Queen’s Park, the provincial legislature in Toronto. His words: I use my art to help to tell the story of the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. Much of my work is made by studying historic artifacts that tell the story of this unique part of Canada’s history and pays homage to my indigenous heritage…
You may have seen Kon’s work in an exhibition at Niagara Artist Centre, as part of We Aspire with Sterling Kon, Amanda Pont-Shanks, and Julia Simone, in the Dennis Tourbin gallery last September (in conjunction with another show at NAC of Métis artists on a more national level, to dialogue with the regional works in Aspire).
Perhaps you also experienced Christi Belcourt‘s works that explore similar formal and conceptual concerns at Rodman Hall Art Centre in St. Catharines in Material Girls. But similarly to how this exhibition of Kon’s work offers a taste and could spur further research on the rich history of the Métis in Canada, what I spent more time with at this show was a small photographic image that Kon included as the inspiration for his work (further down the wall) titled Forgotten.
This reproduction of the Indigenous children bracketed by dour nuns (no one, in this image, looks anything other than pained at worst, or indifferent at best), Kon explains, is the inspiration for the painting. He specifically mentions in his statement the empty eyes of the Indigenous children, some of the 150, 000 inmates (let’s not pretend they were students, or there by their or their parents’ choice) of the Residential School system, which closed much later than we like to think – 1998 – and was more horrific than most can – or are willing – to imagine.
Kon draws literal but also symbolic lines between this image and the specific work Forgotten, but its understandable if you see other pieces on display – Family Roots or Echoes of Silence – as being informed by this historical image and the larger archive – and the many victims and perpetrators – invoked by its grainy, monochromatic power.
An ongoing contested narrative in responding to art, or making art, is that there are works that may not be aesthetically gripping but are historically or socially incisive, resonating in terms of larger issues (there are also many works that are awe inspiring in terms of beauty, but are as empty as a cardboard box…). A work NOT on display at the Welland Public Library but one that you can see at Kon’s website is After Batoche: the place referenced by the title is a space I’ve visited. Let us end this article by returning to Saskatchewan, where Batoche is and where the Battle of Batoche took place in 1885, and where I chose to ‘stand’ to initially approach Kon‘s work.
The Northwest Rebellion and Louis Riel are good weathervanes for how Canadians approach the history Kon ‘illustrastes’, and also for where people ‘stand’ in the larger issue of reconciliation and where Canada is now, and where it might be in the future. (Amusingly there is a statue in downtown St. Catharines that commemorates a soldier fallen during said rebellion, and the implicit ideology of many war memorials has swirled around this piece. Perhaps you remember a few years ago, when the Harper government™ was throwing money and such behind spotting the country with memorials to the War of 1812 – and that a number of artists turned his ideological smugness on its head?)
When I visited Batoche – to the best of my recollection this would have been in the early 2000s – the graveyard and the historic sites seemed haunted, and despite the warm summer day it was a chililng place, in some ways. What happened there is often not taught in schools, even today, and if you know what happened to Louis Riel or Gabriel Dumont, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that between the Red River and Batoche to Oka that not much has truly changed…
In Kon’s work, there’s vivid colour and there’s often darkness of the backgrounds or the fields upon which he paints his pinpoints, his ‘acrylic beads’ of history and memory and hope. In engaging with this work, sometimes I see more of a void than light, more of what has happened than what could be, in the next century.
Images are either from the artist’s site or shot by the writer, with the exception of the image of Batoche, from an online commons source. Kon’s exhibition is on display at the Welland Public Library in downtown Welland.