Artist Statement
European Art Academies positioned still life painting at the bottom of their hierarchy. Being the depiction of the things of everyday life, still life was considered a poor container for the lofty concepts found in history, portraiture, and even landscape painting. Dark Chapters challenges this assumption and status. These realistic paintings consist of things that are ready to hand: rocks, stones, bricks, books, flowers, water, hammers, mirrors, fabric, flags, honey, fish, teacups, jars, boxes, string, rope, and chains. And some less homey items: skulls, bones, smoke, ancient stone tools, sashes, bees, flies, rotting fruit, and hand cuffs. The objects are arranged to suggest meanings beyond representation. Books, for example, stand for book knowledge, universities, and professors. Rocks represent Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing, and, sometimes, Indigenous persons. Some rocks are stones or Grandfathers.
A rough red stone is tethered by twine to a tin can. “Listen to the Land (Record Mode),” considers how difficult it is to encounter nature without physical or conceptual mediation. Perhaps it critiques anthropology. Or does it celebrate ethnomusicology? “Transmogrification” may remind you that many tons of bison (Pile of) Bones went to Britian to be made into bone china. “Hammered (School Brick)” features a brick from a demolished schoolhouse caught between an ancient Plains stone hammer and a rough rock. Rocks are grandfathers in the wild. Stones are rocks converted to human use. Bricks are civilized clay.
I am Métis, a professor, curator, and theorist of Indigenous contemporary art and identity. My mission for the past six years has been to translate into pictures ideas I have worked out in my writing. Occasionally, the translation goes the other way and paintings inform essays. Dark Chapters, the book that accompanies this exhibition, features 17 writers ‘reading’ my paintings. Their poems and essays embody this inspirational play between images and texts.
Before painting, I compose. In dreams, in notebooks, but especially with my subjects. Three times a year, I take a week to commune with my non-mental subjects. I observe them, hold them. What do they want? Who do they want to be nearby? What might they mean to and with each other? Today, a round stone the size of a child’s cranium wants to be cradled in bubble wrap. Tomorrow, it asks to be bound in twine. Next day, “leave me alone, unpictured.” Admittedly, sometimes, my subjects become objects and are made to do things I rather than they intend. I still feel bad about drowning that dictionary. Antique teacups and jugs are smashed with a stone hammer for a point I want to make. Sealing smudge smoke in a bell jar needed doing—but maybe not. No book wants burning but, one day, one may.
I think I am an analytic painter, a conceptual artist. I feel this may be an after-thought. David Bowie was suspicious of artists who claimed their work had deliberate meanings. The proof, he said, was that artists title their works after they make them. When a dozen or so paintings are dry, I bring them from my home studio to the university for varnishing, framing, and naming. Christening takes hours. The philosopher Arthur Danto explains that the main difference between works of art and mere real things is a title. Naming grants special status. Freed from my studio, but accompanied by my intentions (titles), these pictures are now their own beings waiting on you to get to know them.
David Garneau March 2025
