Amid rising anti-Americanism, artist Joyce Wieland’s cheerful patriotism gets new lease of life | Canada Voices

Artist Joyce Wieland is probably best remembered for her quilts bearing soft padded slogans such as Pierre Trudeau’s “Reason over Passion” or her own “I Love Canada,” also embroidered with the words “Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism.” Four years ago, when a Toronto curator and a Montreal curator began to plan an exhibition devoted to Wieland, the Canadian artist’s cultural nationalism and federalist enthusiasms might have seemed naïve and dated.

But, thanks to Donald Trump, anti-American patriotism is in vogue again and Wieland appears relevant – as well as prescient on many fronts. The first living woman to be accorded a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada (in 1971), she was a pioneering feminist in an exclusively male art world. Interested in traditional female handiwork and a dedicated collaborator, she refused to elevate fine art above craft in a way that is now standard curatorial practice. The creator of a quilt that urged scientists to “DEFEND THE EARTH,” she was an environmentalist ahead of her time. Committed to the idea of the North, she was engaged with Inuit culture before reconciliation and Arctic sovereignty became pressing issues.

In the first major retrospective of Wieland’s work since a 1987 show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curators Georgiana Uhlyarik of the AGO and Anne Grace of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts argue that the artist is more contemporary than ever. If Wieland has been neglected, overshadowed by the greater fame of her former husband Michael Snow, it is perhaps because early onset Alzheimer’s robbed her of the opportunity to secure her legacy before her death in 1998. Meanwhile, her quilted messages and stuffed PVC wall hangings seemed to belong to a simpler, more hopeful era.

Yet Wieland was fully capable of irony. Her best-known quilt, featuring Trudeau’s famous political philosophy, is not a simplistic embrace of Trudeaumania. With soft shapes and pretty colours, the 1968 piece (on loan from the National Gallery) suggests that one might just as easily argue for passion over reason. (The show’s catalogue cites Wieland saying she believed the two should go side by side.)

This exhibition, which opened in Montreal last week and moves to Toronto in June, starts with early drawings and sketches of the female body, lovers and faces that reveal her solid talent. Wieland came from a Toronto family impoverished by the Depression and lost both parents as a child. It is remarkable that she emerged as an artist from a young age, taking up with the experimental film community that included Snow.

There was always a danger that his talent would suck up all the air in the room: He was the leading Canadian visual artist of his generation and an important filmmaker, later remembered for Flight Stop, his installation of Canada geese in the Toronto Eaton Centre. Around 1961, during a brief period where Wieland had her own studio beyond the kitchen table, she produced large, handsome biomorphic abstractions, saying she consciously sought to channel Joan Miró to avoid the influence of her husband and his circle, with their more graphic, less painterly work. The results were satisfying, sensual paintings – and consciously so: One featuring a large, pregnant orb with a central hole is called Balling. (Providing bilingual titles for the works, the curators have not bothered trying to translate the dirty pun into French.)

That wit continues in one of the most interesting rooms in the exhibition, where Wieland’s paintings of sinking ships are shown alongside a brief film she made of a sail boat on the ocean. The room represents Wieland’s dual production during the years she and Snow lived in New York – she working out of their loft while he went off to his studio. Like him she was attempting to establish herself as an experimental filmmaker in the city, but she shipped paintings back to Canada, not showing the two strands together.

Yet the paintings are about film, with multiple images of each sailboat or ocean liner acting like a comic or film strip. The sinking ships are also about tragedy, which Wieland knew from childhood, and about the American fascination with disaster. (This section includes a high-realist painting of two fiery plane crashes.) And so her theme is hubris – male hubris, of course. Wieland makes this hilariously explicit in one work where the ship is juxtaposed with images following the inevitable deflation of an erection.

The artist, a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, became increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. and returned to Canada in 1971, sensing an opportunity to celebrate Trudeau’s call for a just society in those first postcentennial years. That, too, would end in disillusion when Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October crisis, but not before Wieland had created the Reason over Passion quilt while still in New York in 1968, and a film of the same title featuring landscapes and cityscapes across Canada.

This was the period of her great enthusiasm for federalism, employing a Nova Scotia knitter to create Canadian flags in different stitches and mouthing O Canada on paper using lip prints. Her Canada most definitely included Quebec in an era where Ontario was often uninterested in the province. To indicate Wieland acknowledged the complications, the show juxtaposes these seemingly simplistic patriotic works with her 1972 film of the lips of Quebec separatist Pierre Vallières as he reads from his essays about Quebec society and independence. Today, with the Parti Québécois ascendant once more, it will be interesting to see how a Montreal audience responds to her warm federalist embrace.

The late 1960s was also the period when Wieland discovered PVC and made multiple wall hangings of stuffed vinyl pouches holding photos, press clippings and other objects. PVC isn’t stable, however, and there is a whole chapter in the exhibition catalogue about the challenges of preserving it as an artistic medium. As well, the show’s introductory section includes a brief video where MMFA chief conservator Richard Gagnier explains how the plasticizer, added for flexibility, separates from the polymer and becomes sticky, attracting dust to an increasingly hazy surface. He cleans it with saliva followed by distilled water.

Despite the heroic conservation efforts, some of Wieland’s most recognizable works can feel a bit tired: The PVC hangings are sometimes cloudy, while some of the quilts from the 1970s look a little grubby or faded. It’s another reason why her art has seemed dated.

There is also the mixed legacy of her final mannerist decade in the 1980s, when she returned to figure painting by creating complex allegorical scenes in a prettified style of soft colours and feathery brushstrokes. The combination of opaque subject matter and a more flowery handling of paint than in her dynamic early abstractions makes these works difficult to admire. Still, they speak of the lifelong struggle of a gifted artist to gain her due.

In Artist on Fire, flames emerge from a figure at an easel; in Paint Phantom, a naked woman fights to rip the skin-like mask off a male figure. The curators suggest that one of her last paintings, in which Wieland depicts herself as a slight figure with a palette dwarfed by a large landscape, foreshadows the disease that would rob her of her powers long before her actual death.

Wieland knew tragedy, but she also knew joy, and in her finest work she speaks of both in a resounding voice.

Joyce Wieland: Heart On continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to May 4, and will open at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto June 21.