Cree artist and poet Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau is pursuing a sensitive body of work in which family and land, mythic animals, plants and rocks form an organic world, charged with an ever-renewed energy. This work is buffeted by a powerful wind of deep-rooted creativity, backed up by an accurate knowledge of the major issues making waves in contemporary art. The strong expressive charge in the works on paper she proposes here bear witness to an open and generous sense of belonging and identity. In more formal terms, the paper surface becomes the territory where the “medicine woman” finds things to heal.
Installation (40 mâts totémiques pour la paix) (detail) (Totemic Masts)
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, 2001
Wood and other media.
A circle, 30 feet in diameter, made up of 40 pine masts approximately 8 inches in diameter and 12 feet high, decorated and sculpted by 5 Aboriginal artists; Jacques Néwashish, Christine Sioui Wawanoloath, Éliane Kistabish, Virginia Pésémapéo-Bordeleau et Gilles Dorais, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal, in 2001.
Installation (Mats totémiques et assemblage) (Territorial Masts)
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, 1998
Mixed media
Four slender pine poles, approximately 10 feet high by 4 inches in diameter, painted in the colours of the four directions.
Mocassins
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, 2005
Oil on canvas 40 x 30″
Depicts a foot shod in a moccasin on the snow beside a snare for hares.
Sans titre (Untitled)
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, 2001
Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 60″
For some viewers, it looks like a wild turkey opening its wings, but I saw a volcano spitting out lava… Took the Ajarutak visual arts award at First People’s Festival.