Joane Cardinal Schubert: An Artist Setting Traps

Currently on an exhibition tour across the country is Joane Cardinal Schubert: Two Decades. In what is being titled as a "retrospective" work spanning a 30-year period the show is really more of a glimpse into one of Canada's most prolific artists.

"I refer to it as glancing back, an over the shoulder look. It would be impossible to represent 30 years of my work, my thinking, because for me it's all an evolutionary process. I seem to work in a big circle with smaller circles spinning off of it. I can cross over the circle, too, and redo things, rethink and readdress what I've tried to express before," said Cardinal Schubert recently by phone from her home in Calgary.

Issues of colonialism and the destruction of our environment are themes that Cardinal-Schubert revisits continuously throughout a body of work that encompasses drawings, small paintings and large-scale installations. Sometimes what is reflected is the collective "Indian experience," but in other pieces the stories articulate insights that are deeply personal to her, such as the painting entitled "Mary '74," a self-portrait of CardinalSchubert holding her infant son.

At the time I visited the Surrey Art Gallery outside of Vancouver (the venue where Two Decades has been exhibited since February), a class of Grade 1 children being taken through the show.

As they stopped at "The Lesson," a mixed-media installation that resembles a classroom, the seven-year-olds witnessed a reality that must have appeared a million miles away from their own open learning environment. Chalk boards are used for two of the walls, and each has lessons written on it. The children's chairs are hobbled together. Real red apples are left to rot on desktops.

"When I first installed that piece in Montreal, I called up the gallery and said to them 'How do the apples look? What colour are they?' and they told me they were brown inside and out, and I said 'Good, it's just a matter of time!' said Cardinal Schubert with a hearty laugh.

#"That classroom [The Lesson] for me has been kind of therapeutic. I was so sick of the rhetoric that was going on everybody talking about the effects [the assault on Native children through the education system] but I don't think non-Natives had a sense of what people actually went through. The physical state of that classroom, with its rigid little seating and tying the chairs together, was my attempt at trying to show just how restrictive it really was and how we were and still are looked at as if we're all the same."

What sets Cardinal-Schubert's work apart from other artists is that she is just as eloquent with the written word - appearing on top, beside and underneath her work - as she is with the paintbrush. Choosing her text with the same kind of precision which a surgeon wields a scalpel, her words cut right to the bone.

This kind of emotional reaction is inescapable when standing in front of "Memory Wall," - a giant chalkboard wall adjacent to and part of "The Lesson" installation-it is a haunting work with the injustices of the past and present scrawled across it like an epitaph to Native peoples. Cardinal Schubert encourages viewers to add names to the wall, which results in the piece becoming a poignant journey for its Native visitors.

"It's a chance for Native people to put real information on a blackboard-unsung heroes. The people we didn't hear about when we went to school. It's different everywhere it goes. My text acts as the primer. In each area people add names from their own territory, or they add a name about someone they've heard about or think about.

"That whole show [The Lesson] was at the Skydome powwow in Toronto and it was amazing," she said enthusiastically. "We set it up in a huge square configuration with only one entrance. Nobody knew what it was so it caught people by surprise. In one Saturday 2,500 people, mostly Native people, walked through it and it was emotionally quite overwhelming; when they came out most of them wer crying.

"As an artist; when I'm in the process of making something, that's when it's all going on for me; the discovery, the exploration, the challenge. Then when you take it out of that realm and stick it into a gallery and they hang it on a wall and light it, there is a kind of separation for me because when the viewer looks at it I don't have any control over how they do that. I try and create things that are going to be a mirror for people, so that when they do look at it there is something within it where their own knowledge and memory can take off, so everyone can relate to it on some level," she said.

"A long time ago I realized I can paint flowers really well; I can paint landscapes realistically but I just decided that it's not enough. It was mainly when my kids were born that I got a sense of what they might possibly go through in their lives. I was working part time in a gallery and I'd see all these paintings with these little Indian kids with tears in their eyes: this stereotype image and I was sick to death of that representation. I also saw curators open medicine bundles and spread out everything in the open.

"I guess that's why I'm making all this artwork, there's so much negative stuff out there that I have to do something with my energy. Part of my strategy is to create things that have a metaphorical jump-allow someone to understand Native issues in terms that they can relate to in their own culture so they can get it! I saw a long time ago that non-Native people weren't listening, they weren't hearing or seeing us and that's because it's two different cultural ethics trying to communicate.

"I kind of set people up because of some of my imagery. Well, they haven't seen it before, and they think 'Oh that's cool.' What I usually try to do is make something terribly beautiful so that if people don't get it on an intellectual or emotional layer, then they'll get it on the personal layer of it's nice to look at. Then when they finally figure outwhat it's really about, it gives them a double whammy because they probably feel guilty for thinking it was beautiful in the first place-it's part of the strategy."

Joane Cardinal Schubert's work is brutally honest evoking images and memories of a past that has often been filled with harshness and cruelty. And while embracing and exposing the truth, Cardinal Schubert also reaffirms the power of the human spirit. As one visitor inscribed on Memory Wall "As you share your story may you move from victim to survivor. May you heal,"- a sentiment that Joane Cardinal Schubert encourages and voices through her art.

Joane Cardinal Schubert's Two Decades will be at the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan in Penticton, BC from June 4 to 18, the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ont. from Aug. 5 to Sept. 12, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont. from Oct. 28, 1999 to Jan. 2, 2000.