Infinite and resonant

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/07/2024 (499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS:

Warm Heart Wheel: My Medicine Series (2022-23) is a mixed-media work by Winnipeg-based artist Lita Fontaine. Now on view at WAG-Qaumajuq, it’s part of Winyan, a solo show mixing recent and foundational works by the 66-year-old Fontaine, who is of Anishinaabe, Dakota and Métis descent.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As soon as you enter Winyan (the title is a Dakota word for “woman”), you’ll hear what sounds like a heartbeat — rhythmic, reassuring, resonant — without really knowing where it’s coming from.

It’s only when you move into the exhibition’s second room that you trace it to a ceremonial drum, part of a large installation work titled Woman’s Drum (4th Resurrection). A touchstone in Fontaine’s work she’s returned to again and again, the drum embodies many of her lifelong concerns, including Indigenous feminism and environmentalism. Its beat can be heard as the heartbeat of Mother Earth.

Warm Heart Wheel, a smaller work that hangs on the wall nearby, also references the heart, both in its title and in its repeating motifs. In this piece, gold hearts — some solid shapes, others having a delicate filigree — alternate with leaves, flowers, butterflies and birds. Creating patterns of energy against a vivid pink background, these images suggest the connection between the human heart and the natural world.

The work’s radiating lines are dynamic and vibrant, but they’re contained within the calm symmetry of the circle.

Through time and across cultures, the circle is used as a symbol of wholeness and completeness. In Indigenous cultures, the medicine wheel goes back millennia, expressed through sacred objects and Earth forms. Within the circle, which has no beginning or ending, the wheel offers balance through the knowledge of the spiritual, physical, mental and emotional realms.

In Warm Heart Wheel, the larger circle is echoed by smaller mirrored circles within. On the morning I visited the gallery, light caught these small circles and cast their reflections onto the floor, forming an ephemeral second round.

Warm Heart also responds to the circle works around it, in a show in which Fontaine uses repeated shapes with varying colours to develop and explore subtle themes and variations.

Fontaine’s choice of pink feels deliberate. The hue is associated with femininity — and is often dismissed as frothy for that reason — but is reclaimed here as a colour of warmth and strength and life.

WHY IT MATTERS:

In the text that accompanies Fontaine’s work, Marie-Anne Redhead, assistant curator of Indigenous & contemporary art at WAG-Qaumajuq, suggests the artist’s celebration of embellishment, decoration and colour is joyful and beautiful but also powerful. A misogynist culture might view these things as frivolous or vain, but in the work of Lita Fontaine they are a form of resistance, expressing a moving, matrilineal inheritance that becomes a way of surviving — and thriving — even in difficult circumstances.