Kate Taylor

Globe and Mail, March 1992

 

As the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival on this continent wears on, we will see more and more art shows about the meaning of the European presence to the people who were here first. Beside the angry sloganeering that has thus far characterized efforts to deal with the issue in galleries, Rethinking Histories stands out like a beacon of common sense.

 

The first strength of this show at the Mercer Union is that it rethinks all kinds of histories--native, female, homosexual and, most crucially, artistic. While in her brief essay ' curator Carol Podedworny makes the predictable political point that these are artists speaking from the margins of white male culture, this show is not simply a litany by the dispossessed. For the most part, these are artists who have as much to say about art as they do about social neglect and have found intelligent ways of marrying the two. While there are, a few weak links in the selection generally the works complement each other in their analysis of dominant peoples and dominant images.

 

For example, Podedworny has hung Robert Houle's large canvas Kanata with John Abrams's mighty black and white images of a printing press, a Roman helmet and a child's face. In Kanata, a central panel featuring a monochromatic copy of Benjamin West's Death of Wolfe--in which only the figure of the squatting Indian brave has been coloured in--is flanked by two abstract bands of colour, one red and one blue. The copy of West's painting is an obvious reference to the Indian's role as an observer rather than participant in history, and the whole painting takes the configuration of a flag, that trademark of conquest. But what is perhaps a rather simple critique of colonisation is broadened into a tidy summary of the victory of the domineering image, in western art, from history painting to abstraction. It is exactly that victory that Abrams is exposing in his paintings which, like Houle's, emphatically illustrate the power they reject.

 

 Similarly, the combination of Edward Poitras's tiny wall pieces about genocide -- little metal holding pens filled with crumbled pages from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- with Stephen Andrews's Facsimile, a series of fax-like portraits of people who have died of AIDS inscribed on beeswax, reveals both artists as quiet memorialists, acutely aware of the ellipses in remembering.

 

 As Canada renegotiates its relationship with the aboriginal peoples, Rethinking History may give those looking for political messages room for hope; but, more importantly for an art show, it makes a strong argument for placing native work in the contemporary mainstream.