[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] well one of the main ideas or premises of this exhibition was to reflect on the similarities of the stories we tell ourselves whether were their indigenous stories or their European mythologies or what have you about how we relate to the animal world how we relate as human beings to the natural world and there are similarities in our stories there are similarities and and there are differences so this exhibition was an opportunity to explore both similarities and differences so if I'm substituting a swan for a goose I'm sort of asking
people to think about indigenous stories and the Canada Goose is really a symbol of Canada and this exhibition is really rooted in a very Canadian perspective on indigenous experience within Canada and that's the larger story I want to talk about is how do I as an indigenous person how do I think about the experience of being indigenous in Canada what does that mean and that and once you get into that conversation we're also talking about colonization and the impact of the European cultures both French and English that had colonized Canada [Music] [Music] I would like
you to start by speaking about why we are in in front of two body of works you know your paintings and those incredible objects in the middle this was an opportunity to work with the museum collection and I like to work with museum collections for a number of reasons one I get to discover things and museums and having the opportunity to curate them along with the works that I create means I get a very rich combination of Museum objects and the paintings that I make so we sort of go back and forth between the museum
objects you see them reverberating in paintings and there's a dialogue between the museum objects and and the paintings ancient Greek mythology so you're transposing that Canadian experience in a very old iconography mm-hmm it decided not to be like in today's world it's a big new decision is it because you were doing a show for a European audience no did you decide to go outside actuality this time those paintings well for many years I I mean my whole life have been really interested in art history and the paintings of the old masters and those traditions of
making images of stories whether they're mythological narratives or their history paintings or biblical parables I've really been interested in this canon of art history that has described these stories and so I've been looking over the years at many many paintings and many different versions of Leda and the Swan for instance and was able to sort of see similarities about how those mythological stories could overlap or maybe even relate to stories that were told in indigenous cultures about the animals that we relate to in North America so it was a way to find common ground it's
not about Pastore it's not about present in a way that you're transcending all those categories no are you doing that that shows pacifically but you're always doing that hidden in your art in a way yeah I've sort of collapsed time in in my paintings and I think what I'm trying to do with that is to go back in time to reflect on what has happened over the last couple of hundred years and to relate that to our experience today because indigenous people we've experienced you know 152 years of colonization and the art history that was
being made of the paintings that were being made in Europe at that time we're very much about exploring a narrative we're very much about telling a story and so I brought that tradition of image making forward into the present to reflect on the history that has happened between the different cultures coming together so you selected carefully those 10 objects that are artifact and work of arts some of them are in with works of art there's two and Indian objects why those works I mean we understand why you selected the Swan for example in relationship with
Leda and the eagle going with your version of Ganymede but why specifically those you had the choice 2000 of objects well in fact there weren't that many objects that related to indigenous people so it was actually yeah so at the Museum there were a small number of objects sculptures that were made by indigenous people of North America so when I really pulled focus and really looked at those objects and was thinking already thinking about animals it was kind of a small group of objects and then I unfortunately didn't get everything that I had requested because
they you know they needed to stay on permanent display but I got a number of things that were about how indigenous people think about animals and how the animals relate to indigenous people in terms of our worldview and our mythologies so you have here are a goose a caribou and and those objects very specifically are made by indigenous people and that's really what I wanted to focus on or the the actual sculptures the artifacts are art objects themselves the fact that we have that that ancient drum here is very interesting so he decided to put
it in that mythological representation of myth that is in itself being revisited from time to time you know little walk house and it's like mythology is in itself never affixed iconography it's it's a moving I cannot refuse one of the things of course the first thing I think about when I see objects like this in a European collection is how did it get here so we have a European collection so somehow this indigenous object this drum or the sculpture got to the museum somehow whether it was purchased or taken I don't know the provenance of
it but in a way this act of reclaiming objects from the collection and integrating them into my work is a way to kind of decolonize the museum to reclaim cultural objects or cultural artifacts and to situate them inside a painting which is very much about a living experience or a way to relate to the world which is very very contemporary something like a drum is still very much a living thing as part of a living culture so our songs are alive and and this is very much about making sure that this object still has life
so life true painting life through paintings absolutely yeah this is a story based on the three bears and you know the three bears is essentially it's a European fable the original three bears story was about three bachelor bears and Goldilocks was you know interacting with these three bachelor bears and this story was told to me as a child by my great grandmother who was Cree so she was telling me a story that was from a European tradition at the same time that she was telling me stories about the Kree trickster with Saugatuck so as a
child I had a blend of stories coming from both European and indigenous tradition no they were if they were told separately but they would be told you know at the same time so for me this is about the reality of my experience and this is a very much about our culture's of intermingling and and being vibrant and and and affecting each other so a number of years ago I was painting as an abstract painter and my I felt like my paintings were becoming too cryptic because they were abstract yeah becoming almost too personal the language
I felt was keeping my audience or the viewers outside of my intentions outside of the themes that I wanted to explore so I decided after looking very carefully at the art history of North America where I saw a lot of European settler artists making paintings of indigenous people in a representational style that I needed to deal with I needed to challenge the narrative of this art history that was told about the dominant narrative told about North America but I also really wanted to speak in a language a vocabulary of painting which is more widely accessible
so I could reach a much wider figurative art figurative or representational work so no matter who you are you can understand or read at least one part of the image you might not understand all of the layers in the image but you can see something you can readily identify with so it was really about wanting to explore a language of painting that could reach a very wide audience I visited your studio several times in the few years why did you leave for the end in the process of painting these important details that in a way
transform the interpretation of the paintings like the maple leaf in the tree three bachelors like this necklace because you've been painting that image for a year and the necklace that you're just at the end you know did you know from the beginning no I didn't change and this is this is why I love painting because painting is it's a practice that you have direct engagement with it's it's more than just the idea and it evolves through the act of making it and this is what really distinguishes my practice from many other artists who just have
ideas and then someone else execute them it's through this process of actually making the work that I arrive at a point where I make decisions that come through the process so I did not know at the beginning that there would be this necklace oh and then when I started to and you look and you look at and look at the painting over a period of weeks or months you realize that it needs something it needs something what is this extra piece that will you know complete the painting and that means that you have to give
that process the time that it needs to kind of percolate and to evolve and so with a number of these works these details which are very important to the final piece only arrive at the end and sometimes it requires research because I start thinking about this painting for instance I was like I need something a necklace of some kind what is that necklace going to be and it's not only a necklace of some kind right it's a very charged neck it's a very charged necklace so I think with each one of the works there is
this thought this thoughtful process about making those selections for the details that will complete the piece and and shift the meaning and the perception of the work interpretation of the work so the inspiration for this painting came from a treaty between the Dutch and the Iroquois it's called the two row wampum or the Guus went ax and it was an agreement between the Iroquois and the Dutch in 1613 and it's a belt physical belt made out of purple purple and white wampum beads and the two stripes the two purple lines in that belt signified the
path of an indigenous boat and a European boat and the idea was that the two boats would travel in a parallel course and they would not interfere with each other in the river in the river of life so this is very much an allegorical way of establishing a treaty where the Europeans and the indigenous people in North America would coexist in peace the raft of the Medusa was an important reference for this piece because you know you have to remember that when Europeans first arrived at North America they were helped by the indigenous people and
so I wanted to have this boat that referenced the the poverty in many ways of those Europeans who arrived not knowing anything about North America who were helped by the indigenous people and with them of course they brought disease they brought the introduced diseases to North America that were not known in North America and with with these kind of iconic or symbolic characters that you see on this side I was able to intricate whether they were the Spanish or the French or the English they were all present in North America at some point so it
was a way of kind of dealing with the iconography and to represent a sort of symbolic exchange between the different European nations and and the indigenous indigenous nations and you know with the with the indigenous canoe I'm referencing Delacroix's Christ at sea so that was a beautiful painting for me that really spoke about this idea of turbulence you know Christ being asleep in a storm and being blissfully asleep while all of this turbulence was kind of brewing around him and I had mischeif blissfully asleep here and so this idea of dreaming and in this case
it's an erotic dream so she's also imagining you know these new people coming so there's a number of different sort of thematic touchstones in this painting that reference dreaming and imagining and the the collision of these different cultures so I mean I I have a few characters here like they could be recognizably you know Queen Victoria or Marie Antoinette or perhaps a pope or Cardinal a pilgrim a Viking we have a character over there wearing a plague mask but what was really more interesting to me as this painting of all was to make suggestions about
these characters but not to get too fixated on their exact interpretation but what became interesting to me was how the the things that people were wearing on their heads their helmets their headdresses their hats started to reverberate from the european vessel and the indigenous vessel so we start to see the similarities of of how even animals are interpreted through things that wood that are worn on people's heads so horns on the viking helmet horns on the the buffalo dancer and for me that was suggesting how similar cultures can be even you know separated by an
ocean and and so I was kind of imagining this pair you know these two parallel universes kind of merging and coming together I created an alter-ego for myself an artistic alter-ego that could live inside my work her name is Miss chief Mis chief Eagle testicles so her name miss chief and mischief an egotistical egotistical so the ego of the artists living in their work being representing that point of view is what she represents and with that character I wanted to accomplish a couple of different things one I wanted to really situate a person who was
representing the gender the third gender the person who lived in in indigenous societies that was neither male or female and we have in in indigenous societies before the European came we had indigenous people that lived in the opposite gender and it was accepted you know they was unusual but it was also accepted it was part of how indigenous people see the world and I also wanted to talk about colonized sexuality colonized sexuality what is that it's about you know Europeans bringing their binary understanding a male-female and not understanding that there could be plural sexualities homosexuality
that was present in North America that there could be men living as women or women living as men so mischeif really represents all of those things she also embodies that trickster spirit so she's playful she also represents as a spirit of love and so she's often in a position where she's making love to somebody she's making love she's looking for sex yeah she just represents a playful spirit in in as a trickster character the other purpose mischeif was to reverse the gaze to be to become the artist who is looking at the european because we've
seen so many artworks in in about you know North American art history where it was Europeans looking at indigenous people so with that mischeif has dealt with cultural appropriation and in fact mischeif has worn you know these fake headdresses that were made by non-indigenous people to talk about how indigenous cultures have been appropriated and taken out of context by by european artists or european people mischeif Dafina silly representation illinit : yo they put cotton maybe he'll exist and he saw boku blue complex the Montreal Museum curated an exhibition of John Paul go J's Couture and
it traveled around the world for about seven years the final installment of the exhibition was at the Montreal Museum where they decided to just focus on his wedding attire so he created a number of different outfits for all genders to talk about love love is love regardless of your sexuality or gender and so it's a wonderful exhibition but he for one of his gowns he created a headdress based on a Plains Indian headdress so it was direct cultural appropriation borrowing from another culture and not really understanding the context which is fine but in this case
the Montreal Museum received some criticism for that and they decided to ask me to engage in a dialogue about what that headdress meant in terms of cultural appropriation so I was happy to do that because I wanted to engage in that conversation mischeif has been wearing these fake headdresses for a number of different of years both in live performances and in my paintings to speak directly to cultural appropriation and what is cultural appropriation what is that line between borrowing from another culture and stealing and so I didn't really know with John Paul Gautier I had
to go into a dialogue with the museum and with John Paul Gautier to understand what the intention was and it was an opportunity to I suggested this performance which is a mock wedding it sort of takes the structure of a wedding where mischeif and Gocha could exchange vows about respecting each other's cultures and that was an opportunity to engage mr. go Jay in discussion you know he didn't understand the significance of the Plains Indian headdress and so it was an opportunity for him to learn a bit more about that it was an opportunity for mischief
to wear a very expensive goichi a Couture piece and so in the end I think everyone was happy with the result of this collaboration and go she was very generous and wanted to participate in this and this is the the resulting video of that performance [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
