Thursday, July 27, 2017

"There wasn't even a black pencil crayon...."

"There wasn't even a black pencil crayon...." - MacBerger 2017

This weekend we went to the new Canadian and indigenous collection at the National Art Gallery.  For all the previous talk about how innovative this work was, I was very dissapointed.  There was one room where the only change was the addition of a discplay case with two beaded items.  In another secttion they used a picture of the same piece twice not 100 feet apart like there was nothing else they could display from indigenous art.  The thing that really got Qrow and I was the room with the really early indignous pices where they had tried.  The 1000 year old petroglyph had an abalone shell nearby with some sage in it, but the room itself is the first one to get into that part of the gallery and it is busy and noisy with people coming and going.  It did not really provide a good space for these very early objects and did not create a space for contemplation.  Qrow also noted that the music from the church space came over and floated in as a kind of aural colonialism.  Joel toured the rest of the exhibit and said that they had brought more in more indigneous artists into the modern gallery.  We also noted that there was no aditional context provided in the parts of the gallery diplaying europeaen art portraying indigenous peoples.  I really expected more from this update and I was really dissapointed and angry that even when such a simple moment of reconcilliation was a failure.  Thus when I could not even find the black pencil crayon in their art box in order to create a piece on how i was feeling, it seemed like a poetic end to the whole visit.  They did not have what i wanted or support the artistic expression i wanted to see.  Thus I created, sans black pencil crayon, this prehisotric dissapointment fish.

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