November 14 to December 21, 2024

Lori Blondeau: Plains Horizon

Triangle gallery

Plains Horizon defines a liminal space that is both land and sky. As the title of Lori Blondeau’s solo exhibition, the phrase becomes the connection point to her ancestors and cultural heritage—both rooted in the ground and extended toward the celestial. The conceptual process for this exhibition began before construction started on our new building. Before the ground was broken to make way for The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery, Blondeau collected 100 stones of various sizes from the xeriscape garden that previously occupied the site of the new gallery, using them as the basis for an intricate, personal, and responsive installation.

Blondeau often collects stones as a form of research, using them as symbolic means of accumulating knowledge about the histories and peoples of a place. Her use of stone as a medium is multifarious in meaning that, first and foremost, forms a connectedness to Indigenous ways of life and land. And as part of Plains Horizon, the artist uses stone to stabilize and acknowledge the critical role her family has played as community leaders, activists, educators, and artists in sustaining Indigenous life and destabilising the systematic displacement and suppression of Indigenous people and cultures through colonization.

A central artwork in the exhibition is a watercolour painting by the artist’s mother, Leona Blondeau (Bird). The painting is a figurative depiction of an aged male Indigenous chief in a horned feather headdress, meticulously and colourfully rendered by Leona in the late 1940s while she was in her last year of residential school at Muscowequan (Lestock, Touchwood) Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Unbeknownst to her,the painting was gifted to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in 1950 with a hand painted letter signed by four local chiefs, attached to the back of the portrait with a red ribbon, acknowledging the School’s transition from Catholic rule to Indigenous leadership. Seven decades later, being held for three generations of the St. Laurent family, it was returned to the Blondeaus in care of Lori, coming to her through the children’s author Agathe Génois who rescued it from potential discard.

For this exhibition, which marks the first time her recently deceased mother has presented an artwork in an art gallery, Lori majestically frames the watercolour in gilded wood, presenting it in an installation that mimics the regal halls of parliament buildings and presidential mansions. The longest wall of the Triangle gallery is draped in a rich golden curtain, across from it a row of flagpoles adorned with streams of coloured ribbon and topped with iron eagle heads. In a bold inference to the ceremonious, the ribbons are a significant and commonly used material in Indigenous culture, regalia, and ceremonies, referencing in particular ribbon skirts which are a powerful symbol of Indigenous resilience and cultural revival. Draped on the flagpoles, the ribbons signal the importance of this occasion as a show of cultural pride and resilience.

A reproduction photograph of Blondeau’s grandfather, Ernest Bird, is also presented in the exhibition. In the aged photograph from 1928, her grandfather is posed with a rifle in one hand and a small handgun in the other, wearing a cowboy hat and boots, his face bearing a slight and smug smile. Even though only 18 years old at the time, he is a striking figure in an embroidered and beaded vest, bandana around his neck, as he stands poised outside an open door. It is an image that has long influenced Blondeau’s performance art practice as she has taken on different yet similar personae such as Cosmosquaw, the Lonely Surfer Squaw, and BelleSauvage. He seems both playful and proud, wearing the identity of the cowboy while simultaneously asserting his own Indigeneity on the Great Plains.

The image of Ernest Bird is familiar to its time and place, a record of the encroaching colonizer. Within the exhibition Plains Horizon, it has a historical weight, establishing its place as integral to the historical record that defines Canada. The fine fabrics, shimmers of gold, and formal arrangement become a stage where the artist shares the history of her ancestors, revealing their impact, prominence, and influence in a history that usually underplays and undervalues their importance. Blondeau embeds her personal narrative within shards of colonial opulence through parody, but, also, with a rightful declaration of presence.

Lori Blondeau is Cree/Saulteaux/Métis from Saskatchewan, currently based in Winnipeg where she is Associate Professor in Visual Art at the University of Manitoba. She is well known for her astute use of pop cultural aesthetics paired with searing political commentary and cultural parody. Blondeau’s impact on the artistic production and discourse in Canada is enduring, for which she won a Governor General’s Award in 2021. She has exhibited her work across Canada and internationally, including at the Sydney Biennial; the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Remai Modern, Saskatoon.