Felicia Gay’s HeavyShield show exudes style, story, connection and the warmth of ironic friendships
Art by Gregory Beatty
Faye HeavyShield: I Eat a Heart and Drink Some Tea
MacKenzie Art Gallery
Until Feb. 19
In addition to being the curator of this mini-retrospective on the four-decade career of Blackfoot artist Faye HeavyShield, Felicia Gay is also a PhD student in Media, Art and Performance at the University of Regina.
“It’s a new program that is project-based, and apparently I’m the guinea pig,” says Gay.
“I will write a defense, but it’s really about placing Indigenous ways of knowing within curation, and how I use my Swampy Cree [heritage] in my practice. It’s something I’ve always done, but now I’m building a vocabulary around it.”
When Gay was considering project options, HeavyShield was a natural choice.
“I first met Faye when I was doing my undergrad in art history at University of Saskatchewan,” says Gay. “She was having a small solo exhibition at the Mendel, and I assisted her with the installation. That’s where we met, and through the years we developed a friendship.”
Born on Blood Reserve in southern Alberta, HeavyShield attended Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary in 1983. She’s best known for her minimalist sculptures and installations which explore interrelationships between land, body, culture and more. Some monochromatic wall works from the 1980s are in the show too, along with video of a kitchen-table conversation between Gay and HeavyShield over tea. A catalogue will be published as well.
There’s a special irony to their creative collaboration, says Gay. “It’s a joke we have, because Blackfoot and Plains Cree used to be enemies. But I say, ‘I’m Swampy Cree [from Cumberland House], so we’re not enemies!’
“Although we’re from different nations, we have similar ideas around art and how it’s grounded in our world views as Indigenous women and mothers,” says Gay. “I know my language, and Faye knows her language. It’s not always something you find with Indigenous curators and artists. But I think we enjoy that about each other.”
Blackfoot Minimalism
While HeavyShield’s Indigenous identity is integral to her sculptural installations, if you were coming to them cold you might associate them with noted minimalist/conceptual sculptors such as Robert Smithson, Anish Kapoor and Alberto Giacometti. As for the wall works, they evoked thoughts, for me, of Regina Five member Ron Bloore’s “white paintings”.
Both are valid, but limited readings.
“If a viewer comes to the work from a Western standpoint, they’re going to appreciate it in that context,” says Gay. “And I think Faye does love that Minimalist style. But it’s coming more from a Blackfoot understanding of Minimalism, and I feel it’s about this idea of detraction. She will never put work out there that is too much, or just not ready.”
HeavyShield has lived most of her life on Blood Reserve in a valley between the Oldman and Belly Rivers. She regularly references elements of that environment, such as prairie grasses, river coulees and wind, in her work, along with other touchstones of Blackfoot culture tied to the land.
“If you look at Untitled [which resembles 12 Giacomettiesque ‘pillars’ arranged in a circle], it looks like bones in a huge rib cage,” says Gay. “But they also represent the abstract form of a Sundance lodge. When the Sundance is over, the lodges are left there, so it’s a representation of that. But each of her works goes to the idea of how the physical body, the spiritual body, is embodied in the land.”
The body that’s embodied, though, is an absent one — at least to the extent that it’s not represented in flesh and blood form. And there is an idea of presence and absence that runs through the show, says Gay, pointing to Aapaskaiyaawa (They are Dancing) — which consists of 12 yellowish hooded shapes suspended by plastic filament from the ceiling.
“They respond to the air you displace when you move around them. They’re kinetic, but the dance they do is soft and subtle,” says Gay.
“They represent your ancestors. But in Indigenous stories time is fluid. So, yeah — they’re ancestors. You may think of them as being in the past. But to future generations, you’re an ancestor, too.”
Another Western sculptor HeavyShield inspires comparison to is Louise Bourgeois — not so much aesthetically, perhaps, but through a shared feminist perspective.
Sisters is one of HeavyShield’s seminal feminist statements. It consists of six pairs of gesso-covered high heels arranged in a circle with the toes pointed outward.
“It’s been misinterpreted through the years, I think, as to what it means. When I asked Faye, she said the strongest women in her life were her five sisters. The shoes represent her sisters, but they have cloven toes similar to a deer,” says Gay.
“For Faye, growing up on the prairies, the animal that shows her the most strength is deer,” says Gay. “Coming from up north, where there are wolves and bears, it was weird. Deer aren’t animals I instinctively think of as strong. But for her, deer move in a herd and they withstand so much — whether it’s the weather or predators — and they always protect their babies in the middle of the herd. It is strength. And they do it together.”
Red Dress is another iconic work in the show. It’s from 2008, so predates the red dress as a symbol for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (which started with Jaime Black’s REDress Project in 2011).
“It can represent that to people if they want,” says Gay. “But the work represents a standard dress that Blackfoot women wear. Faye doesn’t use a lot of vibrant colours, but red is one she will use. As a Blood Blackfoot person, it makes sense.”
HeavyShield adorned the dress at the collar with blank museum tags representing decorative elk teeth. It was inspired, says Gay, by times HeavyShield has been invited to respond to the permanent collection of the Glenbow and other museums.
“There was one time, what she did was really beautiful. When she was in the collection, she would only speak Blackfoot — even with museum staff there. She told me she did that because she knew those pieces hadn’t heard Blackfoot for a long time, and she thought they probably missed home,” says Gay.
“Faye knew that a lot of the artists were women, but none of the pieces had the maker’s name,” she adds. “She pointed to that with the museum tags. But they also represent elk teeth — the wealth you show on a dress like that. There was a wealth of knowledge and creativity, but unknown.”
For Gay, HeavyShield’s sculptural installations ultimately represent stories — stories she’s pleased to share with this exhibition. “What Faye told me is that stories, if you’re meant to have them, will find you. You’ll have them in your dreams, or they’ll talk to you in some other way,” says Gay.
“People may walk through and not have any connection to the work, but that’s only that these stories are not meant for them. But the people who do have a connection, whichever piece it is: that story was meant for them.” ■