Indigenous artists merge form and content at National Gallery of Canada | Canada Voices

In an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, visitors gather respectfully around a net of twisted red rope that dangles from the ceiling and pools on the floor where it is anchored with stones. The visitors wait quietly, absorbed in the artwork as a motor slowly draws the net upward, opening it like an umbrella or a tent, before letting it collapse back down again.

Just next door, a small boy bounces into a bright pink room filled with costumed mannequins and busy videos, and immediately pronounces it “Cool!”

The work of artists Nadia Myre and Skawennati could hardly be more different: The former is pristine, contemplative and often abstracted; the latter is bright, busy and narrative. What they share are highly inventive approaches to marrying contemporary artistic media with Indigenous themes. The National Gallery has brought them together in a pair of summertime shows, offering visitors to its temporary exhibition galleries quiet time with Myre or Skawennati’s pulsating vibe.

Myre is a multimedia Algonquin artist based in Montreal who creates sculptures with ceramic and glass beads, but also photographs beads for large-scale wall panels. Of the pair, Myre will be better known to Canadian gallery-goers: After all, one of her largest works, a massive digital photograph of a (recreated) wampum belt, is mounted along the ramp just outside these galleries, and has been hanging there since 2013.

This new show is a welcome retrospective of her career (curated by Rachelle Dickenson, who recently joined the gallery’s Indigenous department): Myre is an exemplar of a vital Indigenous art movement in Canada that has simultaneously appropriated the language of the Western avant-garde and revived traditional practices such as beading, addressing postcolonial themes of loss, memory and reconstruction.

Take just one tiny example: the broken clay pipe rendered as a bronze sculpture that sits at the entrance to this show as the artist preserves a fragment of a forgotten life in the medium of heroic commemoration. It’s a poignant piece that queries social hierarchies and the construction of identity. Myre titles a large photograph of a ceramic version of the pipe Code Switching (a reference to switching between languages when speaking), as she considers the interface of Indigenous and settler cultures.

Myre’s most recent work is highly abstracted, featuring panels of matte ceramic beads in soft oranges and blues strung together on stainless-steel wire to create the effect of landscapes, with suggestions of water, sky and sunset. A trio of mandalas from 2017 created by photographing circular patterns of blue glass beads are similarly contemplative.

But Myre’s subtle approach is not merely aesthetic. Her earliest works were overt in decrying the erasure of Indigenous culture: History in Two Parts is a full-size canoe from 2000 that is split down the middle, one half aluminum and one half birchbark and cedar; in a video from 2008, hands erase the lyrics of O Canada. Her project in 2000-2003 to get many hands to bead over pages from the Indian Act – red for the paper; white for the lines of black text – is a more effective piece from this didactic period. The intense labour involved evokes Indigenous persistence and resistance in the face of Canadian government control.

And those red-and-white beaded pages are arresting. A virtuoso when it comes to marrying form and content, Myre draws you into a consideration of her themes with work that is always visually engaging. Take, for example, her handsome new wall sculptures made from short pieces of ceramic tube arranged in odd squiggles and lines like some ancient language. The mysterious text is actually Gregg shorthand and, since most of us can’t read its symbols, we’ll rely on the title card beside it. One piece is titled Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us. Its full shorthand text reads: “All we want is your trinket, fur, women, land, oil, water,” evoking mutual incomprehension and treachery in trade in one of many pieces where Myre mutely considers the power of language systems.

Waves of Want is also the title of the exhibition and it opens with that mysteriously mobile net, a tipi the colour of blood, rising and falling. Is it a trap descending or a new shelter emerging? For all that Myre’s work evokes sorrows, erasures and miscommunications, it also achieves a certain harmony, a balance between contrasts. It’s as though Myre could fix things with her art.

If Myre’s work silently marks Indigenous resilience, Skawennati loudly projects a living culture into the future. The artist, who is Mohawk and also lives in Montreal, loves science fiction but had noticed it never includes Indigenous characters. She has set out to correct that with digitized avatars and machinima (narrative films built from computer graphics) that are fresh, bright and slick. They are driven by the same optimistic speculation and technological enthusiasm that often powers science fiction but make no mistake, Indigenous futurism is a philosophical retort to historic attempts to erase the First Nations.

In one new video, xox Visits the King, Skawennati takes her sassy but self-composed avatar to Buckingham Palace where she confronts King Charles with the Crown’s betrayal of treaties, laying a wampum belt on the table in front of him. The show is also introduced by xox, a figure who favours a black tutu, hot-pink accessories and electrified pigtails that crown her head like antlers. In a video that is an exercise in language reclamation, she speaks English, French and Kanien’kéha (or Mohawk) with the latter gradually replacing the European tongues.

Meanwhile, a whole room is devoted to Skawennati’s superhero personifications of the crops known as the three sisters – corn, beans and squash – presented as both physical mannequins and video machinimas. They are both nurturing and challenging figures who persist from precontact times right up to the days of genetic modification.

Skawennati’s work greatly profits from this expansive exhibition curated by Wahsontiio Cross of the National Gallery – and from the artist’s decision to start making some physical objects to round out her videos. In group shows, her videos, with their prolonged stories about time-travelling Indigenous characters told by digitized avatars in sometimes stilted dialogue, can be easily overlooked. Here, the purpose and breadth of her project becomes much clearer.

Her Dollhouse Longhouse is an animated doll’s house, a video on a loaf-shaped screen in which little figures act out the communal living patterns of the traditional longhouse but now projected into a pure white futuristic space. This work is perhaps the best example here of Skawennati’s increasingly effective mix of the virtual with the physical, since the unusually shaped screen, taking the form of the horizontal longhouse with its curving roof, exists as a sculptural object in the exhibition.

What would Indigenous culture look like today if the Crown had respected the treaties recorded by the wampum belts? What will it look like in the future? The notion of the high-tech longhouse seems to summarize Skawennati’s probing project, and it is another strong example of the successful marriage of form and content in these two shows. Watching those little digital dolls go about their business in the longhouse is fun and cool … but also more than that.

Nadia Myre: Waves of Want and Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreamhouse continue at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to Sept. 1.