Tracing History is but a small part of the Glenbow’s current exhibition focus on native art, Honouring Traditions, but the work of four contemporary artists in the show stands up well on its own. Their interpretations of the Glenbow’s collections range from subtle to all encompassing, as with Adrian Stimson’s broad sampling of artifacts and artworks.
Terrance Houle has chosen a soft pastel portrait from the collection by German artist Winhold Reiss. In Many Snake Woman, a woman with a sad, penetrating gaze is posed as a sitter for this portrait as an Indian Princess — one of the tropes of white colonizer’s depictions of aboriginal women as sexually desirable and mysterious. She’s wrapped in a striped blanket, and we find out through the text panel that this woman is Houle’s own great-grandmother.
A video projection on the facing wall shows Houle awkwardly arranging a similar striped red, yellow and black blanket around the contemporary clothing of his multi-generational female aboriginal subjects. He’s setting up living portraits for the camera, and in his video, Aakaisttsiiksiinaakii: Many Snake Woman: “The Daughters After Me,” we see his great-grandmother, the original Many Snake Woman, followed by her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. He tugs at their clothing, quietly gives instructions on their poses and facial expressions to “look at the camera and open your eyes wider” or “chin down.” Unfortunately, the sound bleed between installations obscures the quiet dialogue between Houle and his family. The video camera captures the women as they try to mould themselves to mimic the face that Reiss sketched. Seeing each model blinking, shifting awkwardly at the instructions, or laughing and then trying to regain a neutral expression emphasizes how the original portrait is a construction of the artist, rather than a true portrayal of the individual. Houle’s own daughter, the fourth in this lineage, is just five years old, and her first act as a performer of this identity is to sneeze and hilariously blow her nose for the camera.
This work offers a strong feminist perspective within the exhibition. Houle looks at how aboriginal women have been presented historically via this portrait, and his video emphasizes the importance of matriarchal lineage in aboriginal culture. His family’s personal connection with the original portrait makes The Daughters After Me the most compelling use of the collection in the creation of a new work.
Faye Heavyshield’s simple Red Dress is adorned with only a few rows of beads around the neckline, and two more rows of small round labels that are frequently used in museums to identify artifacts and catalogue objects. The dress suggests a trace of the body present in every collection of something that’s meant to be worn or used.
Tanya Harnett’s Skull Mountainettes are a beautiful yet haunting story of the genocide suffered by the Assiniboine peoples, who lost 91 per cent of their original population to smallpox epidemics. Inspired by the drawings of Assiniboine artist Hongeeyesa, her work here also pays homage to the lost stories that might be hidden in these old drawings. These originals are omitted from the Tracing History show, save a little reproduction on a text panel, but there is a trace of them in the geographies that Harnett photographs.
Her Plexiglas mounted photographs depict prairie landscapes from the same area that Hongeeyesa lived, with clouds of condensation rising from the folds in the land. Framed between these two photos is a minimalist, brightly lit Plexiglas box that seems to contain the same mysterious fog that is floating over Harnett’s dusky landscapes.
Adrian Stimson’s Buffalo Boy installation is the most visually packed part of the small exhibition, and it is announced by no less than five signs warning parents to preview the installation for potentially sensitive content. For some, this could be a provocation to look for any scrap of offensive material, and a search turns up lots of it, but questions remain about what’s really at issue here. Is it his gender bending and performance of two-spirit aboriginal identity? Is it the depictions of residential schools, alcohol use or a 1904 book open to a page on “The Bad Indian”? His queer post-colonial critique is just as much about an awful history as it is about pleasure and lusty playfulness.
There’s a G-rated scene that suggests sexual tension between the reclining Buffalo Boy and a dressed-down Mountie, as they sip from an oversized martini glass and a booze bottle with a heart over the label, respectively. Stimson has also chosen a painting from the Glenbow’s collection titled Rutting Buffalo, pointing towards his sexually charged historiography of aboriginal identity and relationship to landscape, colonialism, gender and traditional dress.
Perhaps more controversially, a photo from the Glenbow collection shows a residential school classroom full of kids. They look bored, scared or engaged by their reading material as a teacher figure stands in shadow at the back of the room. Stimson’s riff on this photo is his own self-portrait in a similar classroom, where he’s the only student, gasping cheekily at what he’s just read in Sketches of Indian Life. Stimson’s interpretation is interesting, because we often hear about the awful history of residential schools, but rarely see pictures, and furthermore, he’s daringly inserting humour here.
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