Artist uses ancient technique to tell historical stories

Last September, Winnipeg-based visual artist Tim Schouten travelled to Linklater Island in northern Manitoba.

He was there to attend a Treaty 5 memorial gathering and the inauguration of Michael Birch as the Grand Chief of the Island Lake Tribal Council (Anisininew Okimawin).

He was also there to document the site where an adhesion was made to Treaty 5 in 1909 as part of a long-term art project he’s been working on for decades.

Schouten’s latest exhibition, The Island Lake Paintings (Treaty 5) — on view at Soul Gallery until June 13 — is a series of large-scale encaustic works based on photographs Schouten took while on his trip.

They are the latest entries in The Treaty Suites, Schouten’s ongoing project to research and photograph the exact locations of the signings of each of the 11 numbered treaties between First Nations and the Canadian government between 1871 and 1921, and create suites of paintings related to each one.

Schouten and his wife travelled to Eastern Europe in the 1990s, and he was overwhelmed by the sense of history and landscape there. He was also ready for a transition in his own work.

“I just happened to be reading a Polish edition of Flash Art Magazine with an article about a German painter Anselm Kiefer, who became a huge influence on my work going forward. His work focused on landscape and memory, which is sort of where this work comes out of,” says Schouten, 72.

“I came back to Canada and I had this idea to start thinking about the landscape as a historical document.”

His own scenery had changed at that time as well: Schouten and his wife moved to Winnipeg from Toronto shortly after their trip.

“There were a couple of things I encountered. First of all, the Indigenous presence in the city was quite new to me. Just standing on street corners and people were talking in Cree and Ojibwa — that was something quite new to me,” he says.

“And travelling around the province, I became very conscious of the isolation of a lot of First Nations communities, and also the level of racism that was so obvious everywhere in this city.”

The Treaty Suites began after a visit to Lower Fort Garry, where Treaty 1 was signed in 1871, and expanded from there. Schouten has spent the last 20 years travelling all over the province and painting what he’s seen.

Going to these places —actually being in these places — is the point. His works are not historical renderings; Schouten wanted to paint these sites as they exist today.

“I kind of shifted my thinking to focus on the landscape in my work, but I was conscious of the colonial aspects of landscape painting itself, just in depicting the wild landscapes of colonized territories,” he says.

Schouten’s preferred medium of encaustic painting — an ancient technique in which coloured pigments are added to hot wax — allows for a different approach to landscape painting as well.

“The way I build these paintings, I build layer upon layer and then scrape back into them. I scrape off and remove and paint back in. And part of my thinking is, as I’ve often said before, is that just over the course of their creation, they sort of develop a history of their own,” he says.

As a settler artist, Schouten is not trying to tell Indigenous people’s stories with The Treaty Suites.

“I think when people encounter this work and learn that it’s a non-Indigenous guy that’s making this work, it’s like, well, why is this guy talking about treaties?” he says.

It’s because we are all treaty people, Schouten says.

“My ancestors signed these treaties, too. We’re all signatories to these treaties. They’re embedded in the federal laws of this country, and so I have a responsibility to that treaty relationship to make sure that it’s true and genuine and honours the intentions of everyone who’s signed. There was an agreement to share the land in good faith, and that’s obviously failed. And I just felt like it was something I wanted to address in my work, just as a matter of conscience.

“I certainly couldn’t just paint beautiful landscapes.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com