A Documentary on Canvas
February 12, 2013
We’ve all seen exhibitions about painting. But here we have a painting about an exhibition.
In 1984, Ahnisnabae artist Roy Thomas was invited to exhibit his work in a landmark exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Norval Morrisseau and the Emergence of the Image Makers. The exhibition, curated by Elizabeth McLuhan and Tom Hill, featured the work of Norval Morrisseau and six major artists who were influenced by him: Daphne Odjig, Carl Ray, Joshim Kakegamik, Roy Thomas, Saul Williams and Blake Debassige. The exhibition was the first to look at contemporary Ahnisnabae art in its cultural and political context. Its intent was to provide, a “long-range art-historical perspective on Indian art, rather than an anthropological one.”
Following the exhibition, Thomas painted, “We’re All in the Same Boat”. In it, he depicts each of the seven artists who participated in the AGO exhibition (including himself) standing in a canoe. Each holds a paintbrush and gestures towards pictographic paintings on the rock face, representations of key works each of the artists had in the exhibition.
In the recent Vision Circle publication, McLuhan notes that Thomas’s painting “pays respect to their source of inspiration, the Ahnisnabae pictographs. It is also a wry critique of the challenges they all shared in the marketing and selling of Ahnisnabe traditions and the new.”
Roy Thomas’s paintings, including this significant work, are on view at the McMaster Museum of Art until February 23, in the retrospective exhibition Vision Circle: The Art of Roy Thomas, organized and circulated by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Curated by Elizabeth McLuhan.
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