When Kainai artist Faye HeavyShield was invited to collaborate with activist/artist Yoko Ono in a new Water Event, the Growing Freedom exhibition, HeavyShield’s first inspiration for an art piece was her oldest granddaughter.
Her family and the physical world around her are integral to HeavyShield’s "process" when creating her art.
But she didn’t use her granddaughter for the piece.
“I wasn’t going to be able to keep it and put it in another show, so I shelved that,” she said Dec. 3 in an evening virtual presentation hosted by Contemporary Calgary, an art gallery in the southern Alberta city.
HeavyShield’s piece, entitled aohkii/water, is part of the gallery’s newest iteration of Ono’s Water Event, which was part of Ono’s first museum exhibit “This is not here” in 1971. At that time, Ono invited more than 120 artists to produce water sculptures, which she would fill with virtual water.
HeavyShield isn’t ready to share too much about the potential granddaughter piece nor did she elaborate much on the concept, but she did tease it in the question-and-answer portion after the presentation.
“Well, I’ll save that one because I’m still going to use it. But she was going to be water. Let’s just put it that way. But I’ll let you know when it happens,” she said.
Instead, HeavyShield’s contribution aohkii/water consists of a bowl filled with river stones and water. It may seem an obvious offering considering Ono’s call for a container that held water, but aohkii/water goes well beyond that.
“I wanted to blur that border of containment of water so I used a clear bowl and printed images of the Old Man River on tissue and then that was collaged onto the outside,” she said.
It is about showing “the fragility of the water systems now,” which include rivers, lakes and oceans.
“(The water systems are) not permanent by any means and it’s very fragile, I guess, and that’s my feeling,” she said.
HeavyShield believes that our bodies and our social connections are extended from the land and we have to “be humble” in our relationship to the environment.
“I remember one time I was thinking about just the expanse of the prairie and how you could see for miles around, and in the moment I was sort of imagining myself on the turntable, for a record turntable, and I was thinking, ‘I’m surrounded.’ I got the feeling that I was in the centre, and just in the very next second, I was made to feel, ‘No. You’re insignificant. You’re not at the centre’,” said HeavyShield.
“So those realizations can take place if you’re listening to your work. And I think that’s what happens when I spend time touching the paper, touching the grass. I’m told I get to communicate with the material.”
When HeavyShield was in her thirties she attended Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts) in Calgary. One exercise had students drawing for three hours before the instructor told them to destroy their work. She said many of the other students “were bleeding” when they had to tear up the drawings. She didn’t feel the same way.
When she started to connect with her Blackfoot history, she came to understand that as the Blackfoot people were nomadic “we weren’t in anyway in love with permanency because we had to travel, and I think that’s an element that I’m really comfortable with in my work.”
That lack of permanency is easily seen in how HeavyShield views photographs, which she uses often in her pieces.
“It’s not photography … They’re images. When you think of them as photographs, then you’re freezing them. You’re adding another layer of stability to it. What I’ll end up doing is I’ll be cutting it up anyway or doing something,” she said.
For Ryan Doherty, chief curator of Contemporary Calgary, HeavyShield’s piece for Water Event is easily a culmination of all her preceding work.
“In regards to this bowl, you’re seeing all these bodies of work that you’ve done already starting to show themselves in this one small iteration. You’ve got the beautiful stones from the river themselves. You’ve got images of the river that have been collaged, the repetitive gestures of photography that you normally do. There’s a lot of these other former works you’ve done really encapsulated into this one work,” he said.
When the gallery was tasked with asking a new group of artists to collaborate with Ono in this iteration of Water Event, Doherty considered “the long history and impact of the Bow and Elbow rivers to the Indigenous population past and present (and) it seemed the best thing would be to invite artists for whom that connection would resonate in the collaboration with Yoko.”
For HeavyShield it was not only the opportunity to “acknowledge our dependence on water,” but having grown up in the ‘60s, Ono’s and now late husband John Lennon’s message of peace and love stuck with her.
HeavyShield also saw a connection between how her grandmother told stories and Ono’s work.
“It’s almost like (Ono) removes herself from it. I really see a similar take of how my grandmother used to tell stories and I would stop hearing her voice and it would be just the story. So maybe with (Ono’s) work, this art, it’s not a stamp you have to put on anything,” said HeavyShield.
She considers her own art “very ordinary… and it should be. It should be part of our everyday and not so precious.”
The other Water Event collaborators who will be exhibiting at the gallery are Adrian A Stimson, seth cardinal dodginghorse, Jessie Ray Short, Judy Anderson and Kablusiak.
The Yoko Ono: Growing Freedom exhibition will be at Contemporary Calgary until Jan. 31, 2021. The exhibition was organized by the Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal and curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran and Cheryl Sim. Along with touring Contemporary Calgary it will also tour the Vancouver Art Gallery and Kunsthalle Amsterdam.
CJWE
