Unearthing art

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This article was published 05/02/2021 (1884 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new art exhibition opening today is titled small gatherings, but don’t get the show confused with the pandemic life we’ve all been living for the past year.

The show by Manitoba artists Jaime Black and Brandy Bjarnason Bloxom, which will be on virtual display at the Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts website, with hopes for public viewing if provincial restrictions are eased, focuses more closely on their relationship with the land and their Indigenous heritage and experiences.

“Brandy and I both do photographic work out on the land. It’s really about our connection to the land and our presence on the land as Indigenous women,” says Black, who is of Anishinaabe and European descent.

Bloxom is from Kinonjeoshtegon First Nation, about 250 kilometres north of Winnipeg on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg, but grew up in Leaf Rapids in northern Manitoba. Bloxom and Black were able to shoot some photographs for the show last August in northern Manitoba, but future plans were halted as COVID-19 cases began to rise throughout the province.

“At the time when we were rewarded the space to do an exhibit, we had no clue what this year would look like at the time, so I wouldn’t say small gatherings was about or based off our restrictions, but it ended up being that way as well,” says Bloxom.

“It’s about our time on the land and connection with the land alone or in small gatherings like our ancestors were, and ironically, that’s where we are today.”

Bloxom lives in Denare Beach, Sask., just outside Flin Flon, where the two photographers met late in 2019. Black was helping set up an exhibition of the REDress project, a show she created in 2011 symbolizing murdered and missing Indigenous women and children that debuted at the University of Winnipeg, but was also shown at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in 2014 and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

“We both said then and there that we are not finished and we will cross paths again soon,” Bloxom says.

Many of the works in small gatherings are self-portraits and the photographs show either Bloxom or Black in the northern Manitoba wilderness or, in one case, with their faces blurred by a shallow stream.

“I’ve been a self-portrait artist for a few years now so the COVID restrictions did not have an impact on my art at all. I’m very thankful for that, as it is my healing tool I’ve been preparing for unknowingly,” Bloxom says.

Small gatherings also includes clay impressions Black created on three of the walls on a side room at the Platform gallery. They are body art; Black covered herself in clay and pressed her body on the wall to create the images.

People involved in ceremonies would have clay painted on them, Black says, and that added another connection between Indigenous people and the land.

She had worked with clay and pottery before, but a workshop she took part in at the University of Winnipeg in 2017 that included other Indigenous artists, such as KC Adams, Lita Fontaine and Niki Little, got her interested in how her Indigenous ancestors created ceramics.

“We had a chance to learn about blacked-out pottery, which is the method of pottery-making used here thousands of years ago by Anishinaabe and Cree people,” Black recalls. “Working with that clay and getting to know that history really made an impression on me.

“I feel a lot of the work that I do stems from an impetus to relearn a lot of the culture and heritage that was lost through my family line.”

For Bloxom, taking photographs for the exhibition created a welcome distraction from the pandemic and its effect on the commercial side of her photographic career.

“I’m a wedding photographer and I would sell my art, but with small businesses closing, nobody’s buying,” she says. “With weddings being cancelled, it has put a financial strain on me and my family for sure.”

 

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall