March 06, 2004 - April 11, 2004
Galleries 1 & 2
The Art Gallery of Sudbury invites you to meet the artist, Bonnie Devine on Saturday, March 6 for the opening of Stories from the Shield. The screening of Rooster Rock starts off the afternoon followed with an Artist Talk and reception. Through the mediums of drawing, sculpture and video Devine tells a story of the Serpent River First Nation.
Saturday March 6, 2003
2:00 -- Screening of Rooster Rock: The Story of Serpent
River
2:30 -- Artist Talk
3:30 -- Reception
In 1953 uranium was discovered on the north shore of Lake Huron in
what is now called Elliot Lake Ontario. Thousands of miners, prospectors and
entrepreneurs descended on the area to participate in the extraction of the
ore. They left just as quickly when the world demand for uranium collapsed a
decade later. But the legacy of that era lives on: approximately 130 million
tons of radio active mill tailings were left on the ground when the mines
closed down.
Bonnie Devine is a member of the Serpent River First Nation, the
community most directly impacted by the uranium mining. Stories from the
Shield is her examination of this history and her articulation of the delicate
yet elemental relationship of land to human beings, especially as this is
revealed in the technologies, designs and narrative traditions of the Ojibway.
‘Drawing on my personal memories
of the traditional crafts which my grandparents practiced and combining these
with Western techniques of representation and construction, I am gradually
developing a way of telling that is specifically my own. Though my subject
matter is often rooted in the history or traditions of the Ojibway, the
materials I work with are usually non-traditional. I am interested in the
oppositions inherent in the terms history and memory, science and mythology,
art and artifact and these oppositions and their cultural antecedents form the
basis of much of my work.’
Bonnie Devine
Sculpture: A series of forms and structures sewn out of
paper. The largest of these is a canoe, built according to the tradition of
the Ojibway navigators, made from my masters thesis research notes on uranium
mining in Elliot Lake. Sewn from hundreds of pages of notebook paper, it is a
canoe that reads. Approximately sixteen feet long, it is inscribed with
drawings derived from physics and geology that stand in for ancient
pictographic transformation symbols. It will, I hope, carry far the story of
the people and the land.
Video: The drawings and the idiosyncratic voices they evoke
provide the structure for an experimental video piece, Rooster Rock: the Story
of Serpent River, completed in 2002 in collaboration with Rebecca Garrett.
Drawings: Seventy-eight mixed media drawings tell the story of the
uranium mining in Elliot Lake Ontario. Now framed, they were originally
fastened into three codices or notebooks titled Radiation and Radiance.
‘The
drawings make a connection with their automatiste shapes of human desire and
emotion; they connect images of a symbiotic parasite, a nuclear menace with
utterly destructive power. A significant body of washes created from ink, tar,
watercolour and beads, these drawings provide a powerful visual essay about
Anishnabec of Serpent River and the people of Elliot Lake.’
~
Robert Houle , September 28, 2003
For further information on the artist or event,
please contact Celeste Scopelites, Director / Curator, Art Gallery of Sudbury, cscopelites@artsudbury.org
or 675-4871 ext. 223.
