Exhibition essay for Amy Malbeuf’s solo exhibition, Tensions, at Artspace in Peterborough, ON. Published by Artspace, September 2018.
Indigenous history is often seen through a lens of male dominated historical discourse and the stories of Indigenous women have often been ignored and overlooked. Through her work, Amy Malbeuf explores these untold stories, through personal explorations of familial histories, ecological and conservation issues, and her personal identity as a Métis person and as a human being in the world. Using traditional techniques that many of her ancestors used—beading, hide tanning, tufting— along with contemporary materials, Malbeuf weaves a tale of what it means to be a Métis person today through her deeply personal artistic practice.
When I first encountered Malbeuf’s work in 2014 at her solo exhibition kayâs-ago at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton I was in awe of the intricate, and what seemed tedious, details. The installation consisted of eighteen round light panels with tufted caribou hair words and phrases in Cree, Michif, and English. The words and phrases that Malbeuf chose to sculpt are from Indigenous artists and authors, family and community members, and slang words from her community [1]. The soft light of the panels illuminated the tufted letters, providing an ethereal feel to the works. With Malbeuf being one of the few contemporary caribou hair tufters practicing today [2], she asserts Métis presence in the settler space of the gallery through the use of traditional art practices. For kayâs-ago: L. Riel (2014), Malbeuf tufted a quote that is often attributed to Louis Riel, “My people will sleep for one hundred years but when they awake it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Malbeuf joked that she felt obligated to include that quote in the series but that it is “motivational and inspirational” nonetheless [3]. There is a patience needed when working with caribou hair; it is time consuming, tedious, and intricate work. You can see the patience in Malbeuf’s tufted works, making it look effortless. She revitalizes this traditional technique, deviating from traditional motifs, and presents it within contemporary Métis realities.
Another of Malbeuf’s works that use tufting to explore ideas of personal and familial memory is Cream and Sugar (2017). Using the traditional craft of tufting—employed by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit—coupled with inherited objects, Malbeuf searches for and explores hidden familial histories and her personal connection to those histories. Cream and Sugar is made up of inherited objects—a wooden shelf, a china creamer, and a china sugar bowl—with tufted caribou hair dyed pink, red, and green and adorned to the china dinnerware in the same pattern as the apple blossom motif found underneath. The tufted apple blossoms animate the china dinnerware and bring the objects, passed down from Malbeuf’s grandmother, back to life. When I first saw Cream and Sugar I spent considerable time looking at all angles of these once utilitarian objects trying to stop myself from picking them up to look even closer. There was a familiar presence felt while inspecting the china dinnerware, objects that looked oh so familiar to dinnerware I had seen in my grandparents’ house when I was a child. Cream and Sugar brought me back to that time and I wanted to relive it by handling the objects, however, they were not the same objects, they had been transformed. Malbeuf’s transformation of the once utilitarian objects coupled with the tufted adornments have made the dinnerware objects that span time and space.
Although Malbeuf utilizes tufting in many of her works, that is not the only traditional Métis technique she employs. Beading is one of the most recognizable Métis artistic forms and patterns are often passed down from generation to generation. Malbeuf uses beading in many of her works to engage historical and contemporary Indigenous realities while exploring her personal connection to those realties. In Jimmie Durham 1974 (2014), she uses bright blue glass crow beads on a blue polyurethane tarp to bead a phrase from an essay Durham wrote in 1974: “An Indian who sits and does beadwork or conducts beadwork classes, or trades beadwork when he or she should be on the front line with a gun, or organizing his or her community, is performing a counter-revolutionary act” [4].The beadwork and quote are referential, critiquing and paying homage to Durham’s writing. Durham got it wrong—beadwork is a revolutionary and a political act. It is an “act of silent resistance” whether traditional forms and iconography are used or, like Malbeuf, the beaded works challenge and engage with contemporary imagery and discourses [5]. When you bead, you are not only embracing traditional techniques but also preserving those techniques for future use and continual preservation. It is in direct defiance of past government sanctioned cultural erasure and an act of resistance. For Malbeuf, the use of beadwork on tarp was a tribute to protest signs made of tarp that she saw during the Idle No More Movement [6]. Jimmie Durham 1974 can be seen as a protest sign in its own right, protesting cultural erasure and the erasure of the role Indigenous women have had, and continue to have, in shaping Indigenous social movements.
Jimmie Durham 1974 was Malbeuf’s first work that made use of polyurethane tarp, a material that she continues to use and has quickly grown to love [7]. Her use polyurethane tarp is multilayered; it is readily available and cheap, both in cost and design, it is utilitarian like many of the objects she uses, and it is oil derived and disposable, speaking to environmental concerns that are often weaved throughout her works. There is also a parallel between the contemporary use of tarps and historical use of tanned hides within Indigenous cultures. Hides were used for almost everything, from ceremonial objects to utilitarian objects like clothing, becoming worn out and repurposed until it eventually disintegrated with continual reuse. Hide was disposable in a sense, much like how tarps are currently used and viewed, although a tarp’s use time is much shorter and has a much higher cost for the environment.
Tarp 2017 (2017) is another work where Malbeuf utilizes beadwork and tarps together to engage with contemporary Indigenous realities, but this time to highlight the commodification of Indigenous women’s labour and art in relation to capitalism and colonialism in a historical and contemporary context [8]. Tarp 2017 is a bare blue polyurethane tarp with the words “Tarp 2017” beaded onto the upper left hand corner in a serif font that is reminiscent of vintage tourist postcards. It is a reference to the handcrafted, and often beaded, objects that were and are created for competitions and art fairs, objects that are mostly consumed by non-Indigenous people in the search for ‘authentic’ Indigenous goods [9]. The commodification of Indigenous labour and cultures is not something of the past; fairs and competitions have been replaced with global tourism. Non-Indigenous people, working within the global tourism industry, are making a profit off of appropriated Indigenous labour and art as more and more people seek out ‘authentic’ Indigenous goods. Flooding the market with appropriated goods reduces the value of authentically made Indigenous goods and causes Indigenous communities who rely on tourism to devalue their own goods to meet market demand and the perceived value of those goods. This further perpetuates the cycle of dependence on the global tourism industry creating a tension between Indigenous communities and tourists who believe they are buying ‘authentic’ goods.
Ecological and conservation issues are close to heart for Malbeuf and in her recent works she explores these issues in characteristic form—with tufting. Her recent tufting series consist of three animals whose conservation designations are listed as at-risk in the Province of Alberta [10]; Arctic Grayling (2017), Whooping Crane (2017), and Woodland Caribou (2017). Like Cream and Sugar, Malbeuf utilizes traditional tufting motifs along with contemporary materials, this time to engage in a critical ecological dialogue. The white-as-snow tufted animals are set against a black velvet background that is bisected with thin strips of black polyurethane tarp. The tarp is stitched into the velvet surface to reflect aerial maps of pipeline routes that bisect the habitats of the tufted animals. The stitched tarp strips break through the fragile velvet surface and elicits images of the violence that is done to the land with the construction of pipelines. The black-as-oil background focuses the attention on the tufted sculpture, the difference in contrast burning the images of the at-risk animals my mind. The loss of habitat and land destruction from oil and gas extraction and exploitation is the crux of Arctic Grayling, Whooping Crane, and Woodland Caribou. Caribou populations in Alberta are declining rapidly while conservation efforts are battling against increased and sustained oil extraction and land exploitation. As a result, caribou hair is becoming increasingly difficult to find and Malbeuf continues to employ tufting to bring attention to this realty. There is more at stake than just the difficulty in finding the material needed to complete her works, there are larger issues at play, this is something that Malbeuf acknowledges and cares about deeply.
Heart (2017), one of Malbeuf’s largest installations to date, is a deeply personal work that is another exploration of the relationship between natural resource extraction/use, the land, and the body. The work is a massive, white canvas tarp that hangs from the ceiling with a circular void cut into the center at eye level. This is a “very emotional” [11] piece for Malbeuf as it is an exploration of her visceral reaction to seeing Alex Janvier’s Oil Patch Heartbeat (2013) for the first time. Oil Patch Heartbeat is a circular canvas encompassed by a black edge that bleeds into and overtakes Janvier’s characteristic tangled abstractions. The void in Heart is the same size as the canvas that Janvier used for his painting and is lined with bear grease, reminiscent of the black edge of Oil Patch Heartbeat. Janvier created the work at the height of oil and gas extraction in Northern Alberta positioning the work to speak to the ”horrors brought on by industrial destruction” and exploitation of the land [12]. Whereas Janvier’s piece can be seen as a political work—created for and subsequently rejected by an oil company [13]—Malbeuf’s work is an emotional exploration of how she feels when she is “in places where the land has been destroyed…sold for development or more oil and gas extraction” [14]. For her, and many Indigenous people, there is a deep connection to the land; it is territory, home, and a life source.
Malbeuf is both a Métis artist and an artist that happens to be Métis and her works are unequivocally Métis. The way she uses traditional and contemporary techniques and materials to work through and explore ecological issues, familial histories, Indigenous realities, and personal identity subverts what is often thought of as Métis art. Her work is situated within a diverse realm of Métis contemporary art, a realm that is as diverse as Métis people. Malbeuf’s practice reminds the viewer that Métis art and culture is dynamic, evolving, and thriving. Her work and practice is deeply personal, but it is also deeply familiar.
Notes
[1] Amy Malbeuf, Artist Talk, Edmonton Poetry Festival, Edmonton, April 24, 2018.
[2] Sherry Farrell Racette, “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 119.
[3] Amy Malbeuf, Interview with author, May 1, 2018.
[4] Quote is taken from Durham’s essay, "American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle.”
[5] Nadia Myre from James Martin, “Nadia Myre’s Art Project Is Already at the McCord,” Concordia’s Thursday Report, June 6, 2002, at http://ctr.concordia.ca/2001-02/ June_6/08-Myre/index.shtml, as of July 9, 2018.
[6] Malbeuf, interview.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Malbeuf, artist talk.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Government of Alberta. Environment and Parks, Fish and Wildlife Branch. Endangered, Threatened, Special Concern and Data Deficient Species in Alberta: Alberta Species at Risk. July 4, 2014. http://aep.alberta.ca/fish-wildlife/species-at risk/documents/SpeciesAssessedConservation-2014a.pdf
[11] Malbeuf, interview.
[12] Whyte, Murray, “Alex Janvier at the McMichael: the art of defiance.” The Toronto Star, October 15, 2017. Accessed July 9, 2018. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2017/10/15/alex-janvier-at-the-mcmichael-the-art-of-defiance.html
[13] Ibid.
[14] Malbeuf, interview.