N° 217, winter 2009-2010

DAVID GARNEAU
MÉTIS/SAGE
By Amy Karlinsky

David Garneua’s show Métis/sage is a rich visual experience. It’s about painting and painting’s malleability as a language that might adequately express something about Métis-ness. Métis/sage surveys the work of the past four years.

Louis ‘David’ Riel (after Jacques Louis David), 2009
Oil on canvas, two panels 4x5 each
Courtesy: Scott Stephens, Urban Shaman

Regina-based Garneau has been sifting and sorting through conventional and popular visual forms; hi and lo formal precedents where Métis history and some cultural practices can be explored. There are heroes: images of Louis Riel, in the flatly coloured, black-lined, headshot-style of comic books. There are state-sanctioned bullies and murderers: wild men of the west looking to plunder. There is a young man frozen in Saskatchewan: Neil Stonechild left to die at the edge of town in 1990. There are nooses, snippets from autopsy reports, a wondrous cavernous space, Métis flags re-envisioned, and more. There are stories upon stories embedded here.

The last time Garneau showed his work in Winnipeg, he had shifted his practice to acknowledge his Métis heritage. There were Cowboys and Indians, clichés that Garneau subverted to express ambivalence, uncertainty, and messages for a mixed heritage. Garneau’s current strategies of picturing have become more profound. His research terrain includes archives, collections, sites, locations and knowledge keepers.

On the furthest sidewall, there are two intriguing paintings that revolve around a German illustration from the 1870s. On a golden ochre ground hovers an isolated head of an animal. Look at it one way; it’s a bunny. Look again; it’s a bird. It’s about shifting identities and psychological projection. It allegorizes the to and fro-ness, indeed, the Métis/sage of both this and this, of neither this, nor that. It’s about recognition and re-cognition. It’s clear that Garneau loves words and puzzles. There are thought bubbles throughout the exhibition. One painting is a collection of terms for Métis. The word Half-breed jostles with terms in Cree, English and French. Urban Shaman has included a video interview of Garneau speaking about the work in the fore gallery. Many of the paintings are like the artist’s speech – direct and emphatic, with clear intentions to mobilize and interrogate. On the back wall, on doubled 4x 5-foot canvases, Louis Riel rides in the manner of a Jacques Louis David’s portrait of Napoleon Crossing the Alps. The sky over Batoche is a saturated blue. Riel raises the cross. Visible are his knife fringed in leather, woven sash, and embellished horse blanket. An upturned Red River cart symbolizes the travel, trade and trails that formed the Métis Nation. Garneau explains something of the disconnect in the image, how none of the history painters had been around during the Resistance, how a certain absurdity lay in the conception. It’s high drama, potboiler, soapbox and wish fulfillment.

Stonechild is memorialized in a few works. The moments of trauma and loss and its later recollection are too much to bear. One work is a painted collage of disjointed and fragmented signs. Another is veiled by an overlay of intersecting orbits of dots or beads that oscillate and shimmer. Yet, a body is on the ground. Figures stand around. The painted beads attempt to distance the shock of statesanctioned murder.

There’s more to see: the John A. MacDonald toy with a noose, the dream catcher of barbed wire, the ominous rear view of a single Mountie, and a marvelous cavernous space. Garneau is a relentless analyst, testing out metaphors, themes and images. In Métis/sage, history painting, collage, the graphic novel, comic books, landscape, and signage are recombinant forms – hypotheses of approach and inadequacy for a living and transforming culture.

N° 217, winter 2009-2010