Artist receives Governor General's Award

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Carl Beam has spent the last three decades creating works of art. On March 16, the M'Chigeeng First Nation artist received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in recognition of the contributions he has made to visual arts in Canada.

Carl Beam was born in 1943. He was raised in a residential school environment and immersed in both European and Native traditions. In 1971 he began exploring his roots and his worldview during art studies at the Kootenay School of Art in British Columbia. In 1974 he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Victoria, then went on to complete his graduate studies at the University of Alberta.

By the 1980s,academics and art critics were starting to pay attention to both his versatility as an artist and to his provocative visual statements. His reputation grew internationally with exhibitions in Italy, France, Germany and the United States.

In 1984, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery commissioned him to create a six-metre-long creation entitled Exorcism. On opening day an archer was hired to fire arrows into the piece. Hatchets were also embedded in the work.

By 1988 he was invited to serve as artist in residence at Peterborough's Artspace. Then in 1986 one of his paintings, entitled The North American Ice-Berg, was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. It was the first time the gallery had purchased a piece of Aboriginal art since 1927.

During the 1990s Beam continued to work with a variety of materials, including graphite, watercolour, acrylic, plexiglas, photo emulsion and ceramics. The hallmark of his work has always been the daring intermixing of media and cultural symbols. It is not uncommon to see famous European icons such as Columbus and Einstein sharing a canvas with traditional First Nation symbols such as Elk, Turtle and Raven. References to science, religion and ecology abound in his prints.

Beam's work has universal appeal. It speaks to the uninitiated viewer with no background in art history, and it also attracts academics and historians intent on post-modern interpretations.

Social relevance is undoubtedly uppermost in Beam's mind. In a lecture delivered to a M'Chigeeng art symposium in 2004, he stressed the importance of articulating Native feelings of oppression.

Many of Carl Beam's works show images of Aboriginal and Metis people numbered and programmed to death. Traffic lights appear again and again to indicate the regimentation and over-regulation that governs mainstream life. Animals too are frequently portrayed as threatened, beleaguered or endangered because of Western society's assault on nature and over-use of pesticides.

Power, greed and injustice are recurring targets for Beam. He has been known to use shredded $50 bills in his constructions as a criticism of capitalism and consumerism.

As a master of parody, irony and paradox, Beam is often amused by philosophical and psychological interpretations of his imagery. Sometimes the "political message" is just incidental, he suggested to an audience at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation last summer. As an artist, sometimes all he wants to do is achieve a pleasing composition or harmony of colour without any hidden agenda.

Since Beam's paintings often contain defiant self-portraits and strong hand-written messages, many reviewers have assumed that he's an angry man. In fact, Beam says he tends not to associate with angry people because "they are very tough on the spirit."

During the March 16 presentation at Rideau Hall, Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson praised Beam and his fellow winners-photographer Lynne Cohen, sculptor Roland Poulin, visual artist Francoise Sullivan, video artists Lisa Steele, Kim Tomczak and Paul Wong and curator Claude Gosselin-for "extraordinary talent and artistic vision." She paid tribute to their perseverance in the journey to succeed as artists. In her view, artists of Beam's calibre "help define who we are as Canadians andwhat we stand for as a society."