Michael Belmore and Camille Turner: Art disputing the arc of Canadian History
Art disputing the arc of Canadian history
AGO's Canada 150 offering is a spirited debunking of a tight nationalist tale
By Murray Whyte The Hamilton Spectator
Thu., July 6, 2017
“A century is only a spoke in the wheel of everlasting time" reads a quote on the wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario, attributed to Louis Riel.
It's a poetic statement, but the fiery 19th-century Indigenous civil rights leader might like to refine the metaphor, had he the chance. If "Canada 150" is a spoke and a half, just how many do the wheels of history have here, anyway? Dozens? Hundreds?
With an Indigenous presence here dating back at least 15,000 years, we could outfit an entire Tour de France.
The statement is embedded as a touchstone in Every.Now.Then: Reframing Nationhood, the museum's response to this blithely nationalistic moment, and it makes clear the show's driving force: to resituate the blip that is Canada in a gapingly broad continuum of both time and difference, with flag-waving pushed aside.
"We knew right away we weren't doing a celebratory project," says Andrew Hunter, the gallery's curator of Canadian art. "We have a history in Canada of telling the same stories over and over, and ignoring other stories. We wanted to make space in this institution for stories that haven't been told."
For the project, Hunter enlisted independent curator and artist Anique Jordan, and their joint mandate is clear from the exhibition's opening salvo. Michael Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, offers Rumble, a blackened copper sandwich of Trans-Am hoods, with effigies of spiritually significant creatures - a Thunderbird on one side, water panthers on the other - glowing from within.
Nearby looms Bell (Wanted Series), a totem of seductive defiance in her spiked heels, clingy taffeta gown and veil of black netting. The series, a slickly stylized photo-portrait project by Camal Pirbhai and Camille Turner, was drawn from a shocking source: 19th-century Canadian classified ads placed by owners in search of their runaway slaves. Their pictures give human form to people described as property and returns the power to them.
Here, Every.Now.Then breaks open the dominant polemic of resistance in this fraught Canada 150 moment, and the complexities of history, privilege and difference yaw open in scope.