Deanne Pittman, Centretown News
An exhibit by First Nations artist Barry Ace at city hall’s Karsh-Masson Gallery examines indigenous stereotypes. His work is on display until March 6.Barry Ace’s Mnemonic (RE)Manifestations exhibit opened Jan. 28 at city hall’s Karsh- Masson Gallery, where the artist was present to speak to an audience about his latest solo exhibition.
The show explores and rethinks Anishinaabeg culture, traditions and memories, and how they remain essentially the same through repetition over generations but still evolve in a contemporary world.
In the exhibit, Ottawa-based Ace illustrates this concept of time by incorporating traditional material in a contemporary fashion.
In installation pieces such as Digital Bandolier, the artist makes use of modern technological components such as electrical dials, capacitors and resistors to create floral glass beadwork designs.
“The bead itself is an animate object and we consider it to have a spirit and energy,” said Ace. “I like the aspect of the capacitor, which also stores energy, as a metaphor between the bead that has an imbued animate quality and the electric component that has the same.”
PhD student Alexandra Nahwegahbow, author of the accompanying Mnemonic (Re)Manifestations essay that explores Ace’s work, said the artist made electrical components indigenous just like native people indigenized beads that were brought from Europe.
“Barry made them Anishinaabe all of a sudden,” says Nahwegahbow.
As for the motifs and icons that are present in Ace’s work, they reflect on the exhibit’s title, which signifies devices that trigger memories. “They have a cultural meaning within them,” said Ace, adding that some motifs, such as flowers, are medicinal flowers and have healing powers, whereas some icons represent mythological figures.
Ace’s pieces not only have aesthetic purposes, but they also reflect on stereotypes people may harbour about indigenous culture. “It challenges the anthropological construct that somehow we’re inauthentic if we use any signs of modernity in our work,” explained the artist.
Nahwegahbow said that Ace infused his work with an Anishinaabe world view and philosophy. “I think a lot of his work is questioning this idea of authenticity and questioning this idea of us only being able to live in the past,” she said.
“People have all those stereotypes of us, but we’re really contemporary people,” explained Nahwegahbow, adding that this participation in the contemporary world doesn’t make indigenous people any less Anishinaabeg.
Ace is a member of M’Chigeeng First Nation, Manitoulin Island. He draws inspiration from multiple facets of traditional Anishinaabeg (Odawa) culture gathered from historical sources, traditional knowledge, found objects and cultural research.
Over the years, many of his exhibitions have appeared in Ottawa in places such as the Ottawa Art Gallery, Gallery 101, Ottawa City Hall, SAW Gallery and SAW Video, the Canada Council Art Bank, and others.
The artist’s pieces also reflect on the idea of “survivance.” In some of them, such as in Niibwa Ndanwendaagan, Ace installed Pow Wow, a film from 1925 shot on Manitoulin Island that depicts an Anishinaabe community performing cultural dances for visiting bureaucrats when it was technically illegal for them to do so.
Dancing for the entertainment of those bureaucrats was an exception to the rule, said Ace.
“It’s really honoring the tenacity of the people to survive and to maintain culture despite the attempts by the federal government to eradicate it,” he added.
The artist not only honours his people, but also the life of his adopted brother Charlie, who passed away “into the spirit world in the spring of 2014,” as stated in Nahwegahbow’s essay.
In Ace’s Memory Landscape piece, the artist documents their journey together across their traditional territory, and he inserts motifs, symbols, and figures between photographs on scrolls of birchbark that help recount “complex histories, narratives and the ceremonial songs of healers and medicine people.”
“That particular piece is my life,” said Ace. “It starts with life as fire and death at the end,” he explained, adding that he installed it this time in a way that goes form Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and then death.
“I stood in front of it and started to cry,” Victoria Henry, former director of the Canada Council Art Bank, said about Memory Landscape.
“He successfully brought together a contemporary piece of images, but really evocative of the landscape that was always there,” she said, adding that Ace made a synthesis of so many things in one work.
Ace’s Mnemonic (Re)Manifestation exhibition will be on display until March 6 at the Karsh-Masson Gallery at city hall.