Introduction

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good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for the final artist conversation organized as part of the programming to

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complement the exhibition of the 2020 governmental awards envisioned

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currently installed at the art gallery of alberta my name is catherine croston and i’m the executive director and chief

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curator of the aga i would like to begin by acknowledging that we are hosting this webinar from treaty 6 territory

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and region four of the metis nation of alberta we acknowledge this as the traditional and ancestral home of

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the nahook cree anishinabe soto nisitapi blackfoot

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nakota su dene and metis peoples and acknowledge the many indigenous first nations and inward people who make

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alberta their home today we recognize that this acknowledgement is necessary but it’s just one small

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recognition of the work we need to do to continue to address and reverse the ongoing impacts of colonization

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the gunman general’s award in visual and media arts is a lifetime achievement award that recognizes an artist’s career

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body of work and contribution to the visual arts media arts and minecraft in canada

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in 2020 eight artists were honored for their exceptional careers and lifetime achievements the 2020 winners are deanna bowen dana

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claxton ruth cuthand michael fernandez jorge lozano lorsa ken lum anatorma and zainab fergie

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this afternoon we are very pleased to welcome ruth cut hand ruth cutthan is a mixed media artist of

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plains cree and scottish ancestry whose practice includes painting drawing photography and beadwork

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born in prince alberts in saskatchewan she grew up in alberta where as a child she met artist tale

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feathers who inspired her to become an artist through her anti-aesthetic stance her work challenges mainstream perspectives

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of colonialism and the relationships between settlers and indigenous people in a practice marked by a delicate

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balance of political political invective and humor ruth is widely considered an

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influential feminist artist of the canadian prairies and is lauded for her unflinching interpretation of racism and

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colonialism her work is featured in many collections including the national gallery of canada

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the art gallery of ontario the mackenzie art gallery as well as the art galley alberta in 2013 she was recognized with

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the lieutenant governor’s award for her achievements ruth currently lives and works in saskatoon

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this afternoon rose is in conversation with jake moore jake moore is an intermediate artist

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whose primary medium is space she works at the intersection of material gesture

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text and vocality to make exhibitions and events and other kinds of interventions public

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she is exhibited nationally early highlights include the walter phillips gallery and latriana in 2011.

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while moore considers her primary medium to be space and its occupation this idea expands the understanding of

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her artistic practice to include her administrative projects and other acts of building capacity as a

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sculptural method one of changing the form and volume of public spaces she is currently a phd candidate in art

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history and communication studies at mcgill university as well as the director of university art galleries and collections

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and assistant professor in art and art history at the university of saskatchewan before i turn things over to our

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distinguished speakers just a few notes ruth and jake will speak for about 45 minutes following which we will answer

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questions please enter any of your questions using the chats function i would also like to take this

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opportunity to thank epcor who support the aga online programming through their heart and soul fund

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as well as the canada council for the arts for their support of the governor general awards and the geographer general’s awards

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exhibition please join me now in welcoming ruth cuthand and jake moore

Welcome

3:56

hello everyone and welcome ruth thank you so much thank you catherine for that kind

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welcome and uh and it’s um obviously we don’t know who all is here but we thank you for joining

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ruth and i as well it’s always a pleasure to speak with ruth and really you just have to uh open that can and

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then she will come out right ruth right

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um i i’m fairly new to 286 territory and so it’s been a real pleasure to

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be able to share so much time and space with ruth and as as you may know we have an

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exhibition on right now at the university art galleries at the university of saskatchewan and it was guest curated by felicia gay

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it’s called beads in the blood so um many of the images we’re going to show today are coming directly from

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that uh installation of ruth’s work and because it is a survey show it gives us a real opportunity to kind of cover

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uh what you’ve been doing for quite some time and we might have some surprises in there

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because at this point you definitely are known as the bead queen you know yes and she claimed you claim

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that title right oh yeah yeah yeah with pride and fully earned this is not standard

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royalty it’s earned position so i thought we might start with a

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smallpox

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sorry i’m getting a lot of feedback here i’m not quite sure what that’s from

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okay i’ll try again sorry about that um uh so ruth i thought we might start with

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smallpox uh one of your earlier beaded works simply because it seems like

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a standard understanding of a point of contact when you think about what what contact

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brought to indigenous peoples and this kind of shift in your work from a very anti-aesthetic

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to coming into things that actually on on primary on first glance appear

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exceptionally beautiful but in fact are laden with uh

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with with uh overt racism intended intention to harm and a much more

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complicated story uh do you want to speak to this first piece um

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when i i when i started beating seriously i was looking

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for um some uh something that i could put some teeth

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into uh because i wanted to change the bead scene as this kind of crafty thing you

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know indian arts and crafts and and all the women that beat and um that kind of thing so i was

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um looking for something that would talk about um

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it would talk about trade and contact and uh what happened when

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uh when settlers first stepped on the shore and so i started looking at

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image microscopic images of diseases that were brought to the americas

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and actually decimated tribes all over us and the and the one i

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think we know best is smallpox and uh i started to look at these

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microscopic images and oh man they were beautiful they were so abstract

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uh they have beautiful colors thanks to a person called um medical artist

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who actually goes in and colorizes the images um and so i started uh beating them

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and they were gorgeous and it’s like totally against everything i’d ever done

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before so i was like oh no what am i gonna do so i had to

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uh i knew i wanted them to look like you were looking peering through a microscope right so it’s the round

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symbol and then the black background and um for the background i wanted to kind of

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reference um two things i wanted to reference like uh when you look at a microscope

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and then everything around it is black it’s like the void and then i wanted to reference uh velvet

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which um indigenous women used to bead on they used to beat on black velvet and so i

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wanted that kind of velvet velvety kind of texture and i wanted it

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to also kind of absorb light and so the emphasis would be on the

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these beads that shine and are so gorgeous um then they’re just too gorgeous so i

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thought okay i gotta gotta cut this somehow so that’s when i thought i’ll put the name of the

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disease right onto the work and i used a stencil

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i love stencils i just love working with them and i thought it will also give it um

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uh you know when you well not anymore but they used to you know

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spray paint fragile on the sides of boxes when things were being shipped and so i

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thought it looks more like it’s being shipped from the old world to the new world so

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i thought that would kind of um cut the the sweetness of it because you

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look at it and you think i mean if it’s think if the word wasn’t there we’d look at and go oh

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wow that’s beautiful but smallpox is staring us in the face and so we have to

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uh kind of struggle with that push and pull between that’s beautiful no it’s not

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it’s dangerous it’s beautiful it’s dangerous that kind of thing yeah i think very

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much so ruth is the stencil makes a huge difference and i think about my own family that

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immigrated from uh from the netherlands and coming post-war

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uh myopa’s travel box was stenciled on with his name and all of the boxes from that family

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arrived here and are considered within a settler tradition to be family treasures

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so it also has this implication of um what what is being sent to who and what

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are the possibilities here you also did this fantastic job of kind of

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developing a framing technique of the black velvet and like that so the series goes on

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and as you say we all know smallpox that’s the one that’s understood or regularly mythologized but you do

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many more things than that you’ve done many more diseases unfortunately these links are consistent

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but with smallpox you also chose to work into a different kind of installation so like

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in our exhibition at the gallery right now you’ve got them installed like this

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and i’m just going to maybe go let people see exactly what we’re talking about here

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in these blankets and these bundles do you want to speak a little bit about

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first the bundles and then i’d love to hear more of the story of the image behind okay um

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i was doing research into smallpox in the blankets and it’s like

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that that story has become um told so often that it’s um

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it’s kind of getting cliched and so i was it’s really hard when you’re trying to

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think of a new way to present something and i thought you know

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i could actually present it as it was presented

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so it was um everybody knows jeffrey amherst and the story

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uh he was a british um what what the heck was he he’s british

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general of the new world or something and this is before the americans uh separated from britain

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so uh they were all british soldiers that were in what is present-day

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united states and they um he was trying to figure out how he could get rid of indians uh

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in some way that would be quick and kind of um he wouldn’t get caught so he

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you know he didn’t want to go out and and massacre all of them if there was a simpler way to do it he would be happy

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so he came up with this idea that if um there was a fort somewhere that had a

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smallpox outbreak that the fort should be giving the blankets and the handkerchiefs

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from the infirmary because they would have smallpox virus on them

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and they should be giving them to indians and then indians take them home oh just a minute uh when i use

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historically i use the word indians and when i talk about us in present day i use indigenous it’s just

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i’m old it’s just something i do so um so uh fort pitt which is in present

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present-day pittsburgh um two shawnees came to the fort to tell them that

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indians were starting to amass and that they were gonna attack the fort and it was

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like the start of what they called the indian wars and so uh

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the head guy at that fort uh remembered what jeffrey amherst had said and gave them

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two blankets and a handkerchief as a gift and they took those and of course

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smallpox spread the interesting thing about smallpox is that it spread

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even before uh indians had seen white people like it’s it’s it’s a very dangerous disease it

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spreads easily and what’s interesting is the life of the virus outside of the body

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uh can be anywhere from 14 to some people say 52 days if it’s kept in

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a box so it’s burling it’s a terrible terrible thing and so

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uh those shawnee went to their camp and then people started

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getting sick so the people that weren’t sick would go to the next camp meanwhile carrying smallpox so you have smallpox going out

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out out and um decimating in indians all over

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north america that was awful so i wanted to present um these blankets as like a gift

The Blankets

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so they have a big red bow on that’s like really festive and welcoming and

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if you notice there is a beaded small pox on each blanket

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and so i wanted to uh have a visual reference to the virus and to have uh these actually are

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canadian armed forces blankets i got them through quinn the eskimo he actually

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tracked them all down and there’s a hundred blankets and they’re

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two to a bundle and then my sister made the little uh handkerchief the little light blue

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thing um that we sewed on i sewed onto it and um then we did i just piled them up

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i wanted to make them like like a huge pile and uh like when we have giveaways

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things will be piled up and then you you know you give them away to people as gifts and that’s what i was trying to

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replicate i think people can understand this work better now than ever

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given the covet 19 scenario yeah it finally is no longer a historical understanding it’s a lived

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experience for so many and well we know that it’s in that coven 19 has been um made

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unevenness in our world really clear and particularly here in saskatchewan uh we’ve noticed that um

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the threat to indigenous peoples has been much much more and it relates to all of your

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work this this sort of pointing to the social um parameters the social conditions

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required for health and ideas around poverty uh location living conditions and

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um compromised immune systems from centuries of abuse so

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this gift that was given in response to a warning of attack is quite a

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remarkable scenario and we saw that again here at pound maker where pound maker was you know um he was

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awarded with a penitentiary sentence after agreeing to sign the treaty so this kind of um uh

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double bind of so-called gift-giving and exchange and sort of refusal of relations is um quite

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central to your work and and the suggestion that it is uh both attractive and repulsive at the same time kind of

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threads through always i wanted to look again at the image behind it

Making Story

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because this is not common to your work traditionally uh you know you’ve done images small images

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and one of the things that’s been quite exciting with this exhibition is you move to the large scale photograph and later

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we’re going to see a video so i’d like you to talk about this because we talked about

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like this um conversation is called making story and one of the things i really wanted people to become increasingly aware of is how

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important story is to your practice whether it’s from us sitting together and talking

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while working alongside or bringing up these stories that you so eloquently speak and

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no not everyone knows who amherst is and well they should they do not very few

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people know about you know the general of the of of these territories prior to uh contemporary canada so

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uh yes the british north american indian act all of these things are uh historical facts that are not present

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for everyone so your telling of them is really important ruth so get to your pictures here

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okay so after i did the smallpox blanket i was invited by the dunlop gallery to

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be one of the artists in their project called side attractions and i

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actually um i must have had a dream because i i i was trying to find a place that i

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could talk about smallpox and epidemic and blah blah blah and what and i thought it was palm maker

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and then i started doing research and i started phoning around i was like what’s going on turned out it wasn’t

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them but i was talking to felicia gay who is uh curator friend um

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she told me that uh they had a smallpox outbreak

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in um cumberland house cumberland thank you and

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uh and so i started doing research on it and it was really interesting because cumberland

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house is in northern saskatchewan kind of close to the manitoba border there and

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they they were one of the big hudson bay outposts and

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what was interesting was they were the first ones to record an outbreak of smallpox amongst

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indigenous people and i i found that really interesting because like obviously smallpox had come

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from the east but um the man who was at cumberland house the

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i think they’re called a factor he was new york knees which is islands uh in northern uh scotland

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and he had been when he was a child there had been a smallpox outbreak in the orkneys and he knew

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he knew the signs and he knew what had to happen um so first this woman and boy come

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to the hudson bay post um looking for help and they and they say look our whole

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camp is gone and there was they figured there’s about 29 people in that camp and this woman

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saying there’s just the two of us are left and uh he and so he said okay come in

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and um they kind of set up a little infirmary inside the hudson bay post

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and he knew that um smallpox most people they actually die of starvation because

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they can eat and they can’t drink and so if you can’t eat and drink you can die within a few days

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and so what he did was he got his men to try and give them liquids and maybe a little bit of

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oatmeal you know to try and keep their bodies going so they could fight it off and then other people started arriving

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at the post and so he and his men they’re like they just shut down the

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post and they had these people quarantined and then as they died they would dig

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graves and bury them and um so i wanted to go

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to cumberland house and do this project there uh so felicia and i went up good thing i

Window Clings

21:49

had a community member and i went and i went to the school and

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i had written a little note to know that i was doing this project

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and um and just so they’re when their kids came

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home with the smallpox window cling they wouldn’t have a cow so uh we went to the school and i

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explained uh to the high school students and the elementary students what i was gonna do

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um i put we put a large 18 inch across window cling of

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um the smallpox virus right on the window of the high school in the science uh

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room actually and so it’s supposed to be like here is the center of your epidemic and then i gave out window

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clings to uh the students and they were supposed to go home and just stick them on their windows so we could see

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how it would spread through the the community and um i i was

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really um amazed uh they all got to go home for lunch and so

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like we had to leave like by two o’clock so we went around the community around one

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o’clock and you’d see these little window clings in in windows and uh uh it was

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it really made my heart happy that uh they wanted to participate in an art

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project even though it’s not like standard art and uh so the photograph

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that is behind them the pile of blankets is actually from a really old grave

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graveyard and there’s a little headstone there and uh so that’s what that picture

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that photo is with all these pretty little flowers and a little headstone it’s not the actual

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smallpox uh area we couldn’t find it so anyway but it’s an important um

Dont Breathe Dont Drink

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evocation of that site and the fact that the students were able to take on things that seem so

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common within the digital realm you know like the viral uh the viral video the the ways things travel and

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persistently at the start of kovit we were being asked to send images to people so

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young people could know that they were being heard etc so the suggestion of kind of relaunching

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that in a very physical way is is uh also i think tied to your practice which

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is very very material like you are constantly making story and

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like making this real for students in a way that they could know uh kind of the history of their environment you know cumberland house is

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a sort of we call it an island community because it’s treaty 4 just over there like it’s it’s kind of a

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surprise and that connection to hudson’s bay is

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uh a persistent one and we’re seeing that uh sort of amplified right now

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as we’re getting ready for um calm york to open in winnipeg and they keep talking about the role of

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the hudson’s bay company in bringing the inuit uh works and like the first works were

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bought from the hudson’s bay store across the street from the winnipeg art gallery

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i wanted to pick up on this project which is a a a stunningly beautiful project in many

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ways and it really rides the edge of that thing you say you’re most um that you’re always worried about

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because you did begin with such an anti-aesthetic and then you came into these glass beads this trade work

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and so it’s quite complicated but just as you were saying within smallpox people actually die of

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starvation because they’re not able to eat or drink this next series don’t don’t breathe

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don’t drink kind of touches on that persistence of keeping the most rudimentary things

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away from indigenous peoples or either limiting access to them or contaminating

25:54

those accesses so do you want to start to tell us a little bit more about don’t eat don’t breathe don’t drink

26:01

yes don’t eat don’t drink i i uh i had this um

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big idea it was going to be fantastic but i didn’t know how to do it so um i talked to my friend cindy baker

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who is an artist from alberta because i knew she’d worked with resin

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and i was asking her like if i did 3d beading could we

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somehow put it into a glass and make it look like a glass of water and cindy is ever optimistic and she’s

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like oh sure we can do that and so i beated these

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three i think there’s six of them of the most common

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bacterium and there’s one parasite in the group that is found in indigenous water um

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in those people that have uh don’t drink uh and you have to boil water advisory or

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they can’t use it at all um so i uh beaded many many of them

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in 3d and then cindy and i started um experimenting with resin

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and um glasses we were buying glasses from uh

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second-hand stores because i wanted them to have that um that look that they were actually

27:30

used like there can there’s little scratches and all kinds of things in them because i wanted them

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to have that appearance of being

27:40

um well used like like a family does and

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so we uh cindy was living in lethbridge so i’d go down to lethbridge and we’d

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work in their shop in the art department and we would put

27:58

the glasses into uh pressurizer so you could get all the bubbles out

28:03

and uh it was quite the ordeal but anyway uh we must have made oh i’d say 300

28:12

glasses altogether but i think we ended up with a hundred and

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maybe 120 because there was so much breakage and then there was so much uh bubbling

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and all all kinds of things it was a nightmare i’ll tell you that um but i ended up with um 120 glasses

28:34

and i wanted to i kept checking the numbers of how many indian reserves had

28:39

boil water advisories and so when it was actually

28:44

it was actually shown first at dc3 projects in edmonton and he opened um the side of

28:52

the gallery and there was this little room in there and he’s like you know we’re going to come in we’ll drywall it

28:57

and i’m like no don’t drywall it because it had this really old um 70s um

29:05

uh that fake paneling they did back then and uh it’s it’s what it

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it’s like what um indigenous housing is like uh in areas that are uh

29:20

further from roads they’ll just bring in like because that’s so easy just to nail

29:25

up that fake stuff instead of drywall um and then paint and

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all that stuff so that’s like uh what is in indigenous housing and i wanted

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uh i wanted that look of a really low cost disposable home

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and we put a table in there and i had made a tablecloth from blue tarp

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which i had seen people in attawapascat trying to build homes with blue tarts tarps to live in for the summer to get

29:59

out of their unsafe homes and i uh beaded uh black mold stocks

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onto that and then at the top we had the 94 uh glasses and there were different size

30:10

glasses for families you know big glasses little glasses for kids we had

30:16

a couple of baby bottles in there just to have this visual representation of this is what’s going

30:23

on in canada right now and you should look at this and

30:29

um then they um dc3 art projects took it to

30:34

uh art toronto uh they had applied for a solo booth for myself and so we

30:41

got into art toronto and that was uh it was pretty amazing we

30:47

were mobbed it was like so many people would come and and uh and look at the display

30:54

and talk about it and i met a woman whose husband was building

30:59

uh water wells for third world countries and and how they go in and train people

31:05

about you know water treatment and all that kind of stuff but anyway that’s what i did [Laughter]

Irises

31:15

i’m going to go through some of these uh stunning um examples of the of the actual um

31:23

uh the the uh the irises that are in them so exactly laguardia that’s uh the

31:30

parasite that’s the one that shut down prince albert

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so people can see that these are stunningly beautiful and they fall into a realm of textile

31:41

production that seems entirely outside of the issues that you’re describing these kind of impossible

31:47

uh circumstances and uh for me that these are particularly interesting when

31:53

you see them against the textiles of like that um the like the blue tarp

31:59

table tablecloth you used uh at david’s gallery in dc3 but then here you guys very carefully

32:06

sourced one of those uh like dollar store versions of the plastic

32:11

uh like these are not the loving textiles from uh uh passed down for generations this is

32:17

what is available at hand within a very particular environment and yet

32:22

the the careful labor and beauty uh is in these these kind of visions of

32:28

darkness but these you don’t have the names on you didn’t you didn’t stencil them

32:33

no i i’m i’ve been working on um okay after i did um uh

32:42

trading which was the diseases that came from uh the old world to the new world i

32:49

uh it was a really strange time in my career because i was thinking of uh

32:56

that that art was a really expensive hobby and uh maybe it’s time to shut her down but

33:01

i had this one last idea right and so and and what happened with that trading series was

33:08

incredible because it’s sold and it’s like wow and so i was steve loft came to do a

33:16

studio visit and he said you know you could have sold that series 10 times over and he said you should in your next

33:23

series you should consider um additions and so we talked about that a little bit

33:29

and then i started so after trading came reserving which was the time when little pine

33:35

which is my band sign treaty um and that was

33:41

18 i think was 1878 i don’t know the exact date but uh so we signed

33:46

treaty six and then so i was looking at a time between when we started on the reserve

33:54

up to hiv the discovery of hiv i wanted to use that time period as

34:00

reserving talking about when we were living in crowded housing

34:05

and tuberculosis and polio and all those diseases that fit into that time period

34:12

and then surviving which is from the discovery of hip of hiv up to the present

34:20

and on into the future yeah so those markers of time that are

34:27

addressing contact and then shifting away from contact or or living in parallel uh

34:35

but that the diseases are consistent and that you can go from um from trading surviving

34:42

sorry trading reserving surviving and sort of charting out what that experience has been for

34:47

indigenous peoples through illness and then when they’re shared but still tied to ideas of pathologizing

34:54

people like we saw with the other pandemic of aids hiv that there was a pathologization of

34:59

people within that moment too i i know that we are running out of time already and we’re not even halfway there

35:07

so i’m going to scoot through a little bit you always say you don’t want to do this and then we start talking

35:12

but i really wanted people to hear your stories and there’s so much present here

35:19

i’m just going to touch on this very quickly because this is perhaps um one of the most ubiquitous or well-known

35:28

kind of stand-ins right now for indigenous women’s bodies and it can be trivialized because of it

35:35

or amplified quite poetically but i want i want you to tell us when you made this ruth i think

35:42

uh that’s got to be the early 80s 80 83 82 in there yeah

35:50

and it’s called how much was forgotten and it was purchased by the indigenous um affairs

35:59

art thingy it was them yes and it’s it was uh this image was used

36:05

for the missing and murdered indigenous women’s inquiry and so they made postcards and

36:13

all kinds of things with it yeah but well in advance and well and your conversation around forgetting or

36:20

relocating these critical conversations and these critical stories to think that this kind of very

36:26

emblematic almost flag like iconic kind of image you’d already started

36:32

thinking about stand-ins for women and necessary stories to be told

Early work

36:38

so that’s going to bring us to this beauty and again uh i know we’ve talked about

36:44

this a little bit and it’s such a remarkable piece and i think it’s a real um you’ve had these moments of change in

36:50

your work from a pencil drawing practice and paintings

36:56

uh very much working in opposition of anything that could be overly aestheticized often almost comic book the way you were

37:02

doing some of your early work yeah and a lot of kind of collaging on of images like i think of chelly night

37:08

traveler in that one early early drawing and then coming into this work

37:14

where there’s a it’s an installation it’s a video installation with a very important video and i’m

37:21

gonna ask helen to play the video for us before she does i’m just gonna let people know it’s five minutes uh

37:26

and i might stop it in part way through ruth so we have enough time

Blood reserve

37:48

so when i was a young girl my family lived in

37:54

southern alberta we actually lived in cardston and right across the highway was blood

38:00

reserve and blood reserve is the largest reserve in canada it’s huge stretches all the

38:08

way up to lethbridge i remember when my my dad

38:15

would take us to the north end of the reserve and the north end of the reserve was a virgin prairie

38:22

and that was used mainly for cattle grazing and so you drive

38:29

through these large areas of prairie and then there would be like

38:35

a fence gate and my sister had just received her

38:40

learner’s license so my father would stop the car and he’d go and open

38:46

the gate and then my sister would drive the car through the gate and then he’d close it and

38:53

then he’d get back in the car and continue driving i just remember being really

38:58

happy about that watching my sister drive the car like it was a huge accomplishment anyway

39:06

one saturday he drove us up to the north end of the reserve

39:11

to a secluded place where there was this wooden shack it had a roof

39:18

and it had a door and the door was open and inside the shack were coffins

39:25

the old timey wooden coffins and they were standing up

39:33

and inside the shack and some of them the lid had fallen off or it had shifted

39:41

and inside were skeletons i don’t remember being afraid of the

39:48

skeletons because a skeleton can’t hurt you but what i was mostly entranced with

39:55

was the outside of the shack there was an iron bed

40:02

that was set up outside the shack against one of the walls

40:07

and it whoever had been laid out there was gone there was no remnants of a of

40:14

um a human there’s no bones there’s no teeth there was no uh mattress on this bed

40:21

everything had just disintegrated or animals had taken off with it or whatever

40:27

but underneath the springs of the bed were these blue beads and they

40:34

were all there’s like a mass at the like headboard of the bed and i remember

40:41

looking at those and figuring out that it was a woman who had been laid out there and

40:49

that she had been wearing a cape a beaded cape not the kind of

40:56

cape that white people think of but a different kind of cape and it had disintegrated the

41:05

hide had gone the thread and all that was left under that bed was this mass of

41:11

blue beads and i remember thinking that woman is gone

41:17

there’s nothing left of her except for these beads and i always i was totally fascinated

41:25

with the idea that there can still be

41:30

a mark of a woman even though everything is gone you can tell she was

41:36

still there

42:01

just for the interest of time we’re going to stop there but the piece is such a remarkable

42:08

uh bringing together of all of your ways of working and uh the the pouring of those beads

42:15

over the stone is so deeply poignant particularly for our now shared territory because

42:23

the grandfathers the stones have been uh not only here for timing memorial but

42:28

have been exceptional except of exceptional importance to the peoples of these planes

42:35

and in saskatchewan the colonial borders of saskatchewan there is of course mustac sorry mr

42:42

sowassis the buffalo child stone that was the marker between the southern plains and the northern

42:48

plains and i when i the first time i saw this i couldn’t help but think about that presence of the of the marker of

42:55

people and the being of the stone and when you say in that in your story

43:01

how um she was gone she was all gone but there could still be this mark of a woman i couldn’t help but think about both the

43:08

stone itself as being what you’re pouring the beads over but also the beads themselves as being

43:14

when assembled into a garment themselves having a being and you know i was just talking to dylan robinson on

43:19

friday and he was talking about um

43:24

objects made by indigenous peoples traditionally are beings they they are ancestors as well these are not

43:31

uh these are not devoid materials so for me this this piece was just so incredibly pointed

43:37

poignant excuse me to imagine all of these different kinds of being and you speaking them into being as

43:43

you’re telling us this story yeah this uh

43:49

video is actually made in two parts the first part where i’m pouring the beads onto the stone

43:56

um is at waniskawan when i was the artist in residence and i wanted to make

44:01

a video and so my poor daughter dragged her down and i had um

44:09

a summer student help me um pour all these beads onto the rock these beads are what they call beet soup

44:16

they’re just like leftovers and then i had bound actually bought a pound of

44:21

french yellow beads that were ah they were terrible so i threw them put

44:27

put them in there and um we dropped them on the rock and there’s a creek that runs through there

44:33

and and there was just the sound of the birds ambient sound and then when i came to do this project

44:41

i i added the story to it because i felt the story belonged with the images

44:49

and this is just one of your daughters but this is quite a thirst is pretty special too yeah

44:57

yes and i know we’re getting very close to the end but i also think it’s worth talking about how when you put these beads in place

Collaboration

45:04

you worked with another young woman yes i worked with aurora wolf who uh i met actually when i was at want

45:11

to skate when she would come out and bead with me and we’d talk about all kinds of things

45:17

but yeah she helped me put the blue beads underneath the um this mattress

45:24

or springs that she actually found at her farm and brought up for us to use

45:32

yeah i i just think that uh that you’ve been making such a persistent connection to

45:39

so many different emerging artists and that often happens through your beading practice

45:44

and now aurora works with us at the galleries and the fact that she was able to participate in this too i think is another part of your legacy

Covid

45:51

that’s really worthy of consideration so perhaps um it makes sense that we stop here or the

45:58

last images are these and if anyone can’t recognize them this is of course

46:03

covet 19. um and part of me i’m just saying these are my

46:11

brains for the last one yeah so covet 19 is the virus that we’re

46:16

we’re all um currently addressing in various different ways and why we

46:21

actually get to speak to everybody across the country is because we’re doing this uh live on camera the way we likely

46:28

would not had it not been for this strange disease but i also i realized that i can’t stop

46:33

without looking at your brain scans because uh so much was so much of your work has

46:39

been about the social conditions that have resulted in illness and and um

46:45

abuses of indigenous people uh disadvantages unevenness and we talk a lot about um

46:52

the feasting of trauma by white people feast on the trauma of indigenous people and your work has this because of the

46:58

push pull of your beauty and refusal and this persistence

47:03

in maintaining these skill sets you’re passing on to so many so many people particularly young women

47:08

though not only we talked then about really being able

47:14

to materialize what that trauma was and this final work

47:19

of a group of works is your latest works do you want to just speak to that a little bit uh well

Mental Health

47:26

uh this is my latest work there and i’m really excited about it i wanted to talk about mental health but i was trying

47:34

i’ve been wanting to talk about that for oh about five years but i couldn’t find a visual

47:41

to try to work with it and then i discovered uh mri brain scans and

47:49

and how you can look inside the brain and see what’s going on so then i was like okay i want to do

47:57

these i want them to look like mris i want um i want them to glow in the dark

48:04

because i imagine what i imagine happens in our brain as they talk about neurons and and things moving and and sparking and

48:12

so i imagine all this colorful stuff is going on in our head

48:17

uh so i actually had to wait for glow-in-the-dark beads to be

48:23

invented when i found something and then i was like yay i just started beating uh so this this

48:31

one is ptsd which um they figure most indigenous people

48:37

have ptsd especially people who went through boarding school which

48:42

i would firmly believe and what i love about the brain scans is

48:48

there’s a visual representation of what is happening in your brain um because i know uh for indigenous

48:56

people it’s hard to understand when your child is depressed

49:02

and you say oh cheer up it’s not that bad come on you know whatever and and how uh if our

49:09

uh if we get medication people say to us why are you on white man’s

49:15

medication why you don’t need that you know and and but you do when you

49:20

have a mental illness because there’s brain chemicals that are all out of whack and things are happening in your brain and

49:28

in my own family uh there i have a nephew has schizophrenia

49:33

my daughter’s bipolar i suffer from depression and so uh i

49:41

i often talk about uh mental health and how if you get some good medication

49:47

just stay on it my daughter’s had two manic episodes that put her in the hospital

49:54

and she’s been on her meds she found some really good meds that work really well and she did her master’s

50:01

degree and she’s living in toronto she’s making a living as a filmmaker and i’m

50:08

really proud of her for how how far she’s gone because it’s

50:13

uh if you look after yourself and get the right medications you can have a

50:18

great life mental illness doesn’t mean the end of your life

50:24

no it certainly doesn’t ruth and you made in your practice you’ve made um you’ve

50:29

brought things into the sensorial realm that we can acknowledge them fully and because of the way that you share

50:35

them with us it becomes an experience like this room is lit with black light so when people go in there there’s

50:41

already the off-putting the kind of surprise of that experience and in that space

50:47

there’s also a story on the wall that is retooled upstairs and i think

50:53

that kind of echoing of um story that repeats again and again

50:58

uh suggests both the traumas you’re referring to but also the legitimate ability to

51:06

bring forward your making and your way of being as as a legitimate form of resilience

51:13

and there you are the beating queen herself and this was when you were doing

51:18

a residency with us at us but in the department of health and i think this is something that all too

51:25

often will people mythologize artists um in instability or instability or our uh

51:31

[Music] our abilities to move beyond the rational and often are criticized for

51:37

that you’ve pointed to how um this kind of making is is restorative and transfers

51:44

knowledge in really remarkable ways so i think we’re supposed to ask if

51:50

people have questions now so i want to thank you very much ruth for this part and we’ll see what happens

51:56

next hello i’m back hi hi how are you

52:04

thank you so much it was wonderful and i was thinking as you were talking how appropriate is that we’re hosting this

52:09

uh conversation with you both on international women’s day so i think it’s quite appropriate and um

52:16

the work was wonderful and that your new work ruth the brain scans are so fascinating and and it’s just i’m i’m sorry that we

52:23

can’t get to saskatoon to see your show yeah we’ll make sure this show gets elsewhere let’s

52:29

oh good shot very good job and now there are no questions in the chat people

52:34

should feel free to post them now because we do have a few more minutes if people want to ask any questions of ruth and jake

52:43

oh everyone’s saying wonderful thank you so what we’ll do is we’re going to send you the chat comments after so you can see

52:50

but uh we’ve lots of participants uh over 60 people were on board and

52:55

listening through for the last hour so that’s really great and i think people from across the country

53:01

and um everyone’s just saying how wonderful it was to hear both of you uh today so thank you again so much and

53:08

i you think i think maybe i should try a beating a little bit just a little

53:13

a little experimental beating exercise but well we did a beat in uh like what two

53:20

weeks ago ruth or like february early february and ruth was one of our guest beaters and uh i’m now i’m a convert i’ll just

53:27

tell you that [Laughter] yeah so you hosted that at the as part

53:34

of the exhibition no it was actually um we have something called indigenous achievement week and

53:39

uh for students we do the galleries presented it with um one of the one of our programs

53:46

indigenous student achievement pathways where uh we hosted uh five days of

53:51

beat-ins and um yeah ruth was our first uh as the beating queen she started us off

53:58

but but then we had hannah claus uh sheriff rossette of course

54:03

uh a german albedo necessary uh but we also had uh mitch case from uh

54:09

sault ste marie and aurora wolf so it was again intergenerational and

54:14

multi-gendered and there is a question ruth about the

54:19

colors that you chose to use for the brain scans uh what i did was um

54:29

i love google images so i actually used google images a lot

54:34

and i looked at the brain scans and um then i had to just kind of figure out

54:40

what color beads i had and how they would work and um like there’s the black or

54:48

areas of where there’s no nothing going on in the brain and then blue is kind of like um

54:56

a duller color and then all the way up to yellow and so i kind of use that kind of

55:02

gradient and someone else has asked whether there if there is a place online to watch the

55:09

whole video uh not yet i might put it on my website

55:16

uh ruthcuthen.ca really easy well it’s been updated so

55:22

uh yeah might go there might want okay ruth gave us special

55:29

permission here but someone’s also asking about how to learn to bead your way and i think you should tell them ruth

55:35

that you’re a two needle beader yeah i’m a two little beater

55:42

there’s different there’s different strategies and there’s kind of a one needle two needle fight going on like the

55:48

factions are quite strong uh but ruth has convinced me two needle is the way to go and i have to tell i have to say it if

55:55

you’re an artistic beater i think you use two needles yeah yeah and you want you want the it

56:02

to be the lines to be curvy you need you need to do it with two needles it’s very hard to do it with one

56:08

and if you get to travel again uh we’re thinking of starting our beat-ins again and we did do them online so just

56:15

so you know um and i think it’s worth bringing up that daphne the first uh indigenous um uh artist run center in

56:23

montreal jage has actually weekly beatens that you can find on facebook if you have any interest

56:29

yeah so that’s with scavengi and um uh hannah claus

56:35

uh i think sherry offense dropped it drops in on that so well they are ja jage based many people

56:41

across the country have been dropping in and it’s really a pretty amazing way to

56:46

get at that process well i do think we now have reached our

56:52

time so again i just want to say a huge thank you to both of you for being here today and thank you

56:58

ruth for the work that you contributed to the governor general’s awards exhibition but also for the work and contributions

57:04

you make every day all the time so thank you thank you for being the artist you are

57:10

and thank you jake for um having this wonderful insightful conversation with ruth today

57:16

always a pleasure to be with ruth and thank you for letting it happen you guys have been just amazing at aga

57:21

and we hope to see you in real life soon thank you and thank you everybody for attending uh

57:27

and please enjoy your international women’s day okay bye bye

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