#AGAlive | GGArts Series: Ruth Cuthand

2021

Watch another enlightening #GGArts conversation between 2020 Governor General’s award recipient Ruth Cuthand and intermedia artist and gallery director, jake moore. In it they address Cuthand’s practice as “story work” and the role materials play in their construction, threading through the objects and actions in her current survey exhibition, Beads in the Blood curated by Felicia Gay presented at the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan.

#AGAlive is made possible with the support of the EPCOR Heart + Soul Fund.

The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts 2020 is presented by EPCOR, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.Watch another enlightening #GGArts conversation between 2020 Governor General’s award recipient Ruth Cuthand and intermedia artist and gallery director, jake moore. In it they address Cuthand’s practice as “story work” and the role materials play in their construction, threading through the objects and actions in her current survey exhibition, …

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Introduction
Introduction
0:00

Introduction

0:00

Welcome
Welcome
3:55

Welcome

3:55

The Blankets
The Blankets
14:54

The Blankets

14:54

Making Story
Making Story
17:26

Making Story

17:26

Window Clings
Window Clings
21:46

Window Clings

21:46

Dont Breathe Dont Drink
Dont Breathe Dont Drink
23:54

Dont Breathe Dont Drink

23:54

Irises
Irises
31:15

Irises

31:15

Early work
Early work
36:38

Early work

36:38

Autogenerated Transcript from YouTube (if available)

Use CTRL+F to find key words if it is a longer transcript​.

Introduction

0:06

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

0:12

complement the exhibition of the 2020 governmental awards envisioned

0:17

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

0:23

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

0:29

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

0:35

the nahook cree anishinabe soto nisitapi blackfoot

0:40

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

0:46

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

0:52

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

0:59

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

1:05

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

1:10

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

1:18

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

1:26

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

1:32

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

1:39

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

1:44

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

1:50

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

1:56

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

2:02

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

2:08

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

2:13

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

2:21

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

2:26

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

2:32

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

2:37

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

2:43

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

2:52

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

2:57

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

3:03

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

3:10

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

3:16

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

3:22

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

3:29

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

3:34

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

3:40

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

3:46

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

4:01

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

4:08

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

4:15

then she will come out right ruth right

4:20

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

4:26

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

4:32

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

4:40

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

4:46

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

4:52

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

4:58

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

5:04

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

5:10

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

5:16

smallpox

5:21

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

5:27

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

5:33

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

5:38

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

5:44

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

5:50

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

5:55

exceptionally beautiful but in fact are laden with uh

6:00

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

6:06

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

6:13

when i i when i started beating seriously i was looking

6:18

for um some uh something that i could put some teeth

6:24

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

6:30

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

6:38

um looking for something that would talk about um

6:47

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

6:54

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

7:02

image microscopic images of diseases that were brought to the americas

7:09

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

7:16

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

7:21

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

7:28

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

7:35

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

7:42

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

7:48

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

7:54

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

8:01

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

8:08

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

8:16

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

8:24

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

8:29

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

8:35

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

8:40

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

8:46

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

8:54

disease right onto the work and i used a stencil

9:00

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

9:08

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

9:13

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

9:19

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

9:25

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

9:30

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

9:36

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

9:42

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

9:49

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

9:55

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

10:00

immigrated from uh from the netherlands and coming post-war

10:05

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

10:12

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

10:17

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

10:23

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

10:29

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

10:35

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

10:41

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

10:47

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

10:53

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

10:58

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

11:06

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

11:12

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

11:19

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

11:24

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

11:33

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

11:39

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

11:46

i could actually present it as it was presented

11:53

so it was um everybody knows jeffrey amherst and the story

11:59

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

12:04

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

12:11

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

12:18

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

12:26

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

12:32

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

12:40

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

12:46

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

12:54

from the infirmary because they would have smallpox virus on them

13:02

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

13:09

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

13:17

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

13:25

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

13:31

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

13:37

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

13:44

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

13:50

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

13:57

smallpox spread the interesting thing about smallpox is that it spread

14:03

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

14:10

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

14:16

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

14:22

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

14:28

uh those shawnee went to their camp and then people started

14:34

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

14:41

out out and um decimating in indians all over

14:47

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

The Blankets

14:56

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

15:01

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

15:07

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

15:15

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

15:20

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

15:25

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

15:32

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

15:40

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

15:47

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

15:53

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

15:58

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

16:05

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

16:13

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

16:21

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

16:27

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

16:33

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

16:40

um compromised immune systems from centuries of abuse so

16:46

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

16:53

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

16:59

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

17:08

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

17:15

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

17:21

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

Making Story

17:26

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

17:32

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

17:38

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

17:43

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

17:51

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

17:57

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

18:02

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

18:09

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

18:17

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

18:23

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

18:32

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

18:37

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

18:43

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

18:50

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

18:58

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

19:04

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

19:11

she told me that uh they had a smallpox outbreak

19:17

in um cumberland house cumberland thank you and

19:25

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

19:31

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

19:38

they they were one of the big hudson bay outposts and

19:46

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

19:53

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

19:59

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

20:06

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

20:15

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

20:23

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

20:30

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

20:37

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

20:44

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

20:50

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

20:56

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

21:04

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

21:10

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

21:17

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

21:24

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

21:30

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

21:36

graves and bury them and um so i wanted to go

21:41

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

21:55

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

22:00

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

22:06

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

22:12

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

22:19

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

22:26

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

22:33

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

22:39

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

22:46

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

22:52

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

22:59

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

23:05

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

23:12

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

23:17

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

23:23

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

23:33

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

23:40

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

23:47

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

Dont Breathe Dont Drink

23:55

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

24:01

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

24:08

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

24:13

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

24:18

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

24:24

is very very material like you are constantly making story and

24:30

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

24:37

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

24:43

surprise and that connection to hudson’s bay is

24:48

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

24:53

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

25:00

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

25:05

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

25:10

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

25:16

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

25:22

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

25:28

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

25:34

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

25:40

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

25:47

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

26:09

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

26:18

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

26:23

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

26:29

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

26:37

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

26:42

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

26:47

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

26:55

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

27:01

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

27:10

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

27:17

and um glasses we were buying glasses from uh

27:23

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

27:35

to have that appearance of being

27:40

um well used like like a family does and

27:47

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

27:53

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

28:18

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

28:25

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

29:12

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

29:30

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

29:36

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

29:43

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

29:52

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

30:04

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

31:36

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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