Jane Ash Poitras: Rituals

A short article I wrote for Mass Art Guide (MAG), published this month.

By Ian Kenney

Reconciling our past; understanding our nature as individuals and as societies; exploring the jagged edges that divide our personal and cultural identities. Exploration of these themes is certainly not new to contemporary art. But we sometimes forget that these same issues are the ones that many Aboriginal people and their communities have been struggling with for generations. Working through these issues is a necessary part of the process of healing, as present social and cultural locations are redefined and renegotiated.

Artist Jane Ash Poitras not only expresses the disorder of the healing process, she celebrates it. In her exhibition of paintings at Ottawa’s Galerie d'art Vincent this fall, Poitras pays tribute to the healers, and the rituals of healing.

The body of Poitras’ work offers a powerful representation of the chaotic search for ones’ social and cultural location. Works such as “Cosmic Ancestors” and “Shaman Waiting for Birth” are typical, in which expressionistic blends of vivid, earthy colours, and bold textures evoke the mystical healing energy surrounding traditional Aboriginal symbols (the sun, the elements, spiritual symbols). In “Watering the Gift of Life”, also featured in this exhibit, the same primal colours, shapes, textures and references frame a simple photograph of a native woman gently watering a flower.

By mixing old with the new in this way, Poitras reminds us that it is through our past that we make sense of our present.

Poitras knows intimately the borders between the traditional and the contemporary. A member of the Cree Nation, she was born in 1951 near Fort Chipewyan Alberta, and raised by a European family. First completing a degree in microbiology, she then studied fine arts, eventually completing a master’s degree in printmaking. It was through her art that she began to explore her First Nation identity.

Her explorations took her to where few other Native artists had gone to that point. She, along with a handful of other artists, such as Ojibwe artist Carl Beam, were the first to be accepted in mainstream art circles, while still remaining true to their Native roots.

As gallery owner Vincent Fortier says, “She brought Native art to the level of contemporary art. After her, it was no longer treated like a craft as it had been in the past, and she was the first to be treated the same as other artists.”

Galerie D’Art Vincent
October 21 to November 3, 2007
Artist in attendance on
October 21 from 2–5 PM
1 Rideau St./Chateau Laurier
Main Lobby, Ottawa, ON
T: 613-241-1144
www.inuitfinearts.com
info@galleryvincent.com

See the article in the October issue of MAG, or online here.