Daphne Odjig - Essay
by Jann LM Bailey
“If my work as an artist has somehow helped to open doors between our people and the non-Native community, then I am glad. I am even more deeply pleased if it has helped to encourage the young people that have followed our generation to express their pride in our heritage more openly, more joyfully than I would have ever dared to think possible.” [1]
Daphne Odjig’s work as an artist and as an advocate for Aboriginal artists, women and children has been a life-long story of optimism and inspiration. She is an extraordinary, self-taught artist. Her work in several mediums was groundbreaking in its day, not only for its subject matter, but also for her use of line, colour and form. So original was her work in the 1960s and 1970s, her colleague and friend Norval Morrisseau, “with a twinkle in his eye,” [2] dubbed her “Picasso’s Grandmother.”
Odjig assimilated the pictorial styles of the Anishnabe and Coast Salish traditions along with Cubist and Surrealist influences. Her work has always been defined by highly expressive organic shapes, undulating line, bold outlining, abstracted figuration and an unsurpassed sense of colour. A master of two-dimensional representation, Odjig has explored equally the fields of painting, drawing and printmaking. Producing balanced compositions often geometric in nature, she relied on her trademark style of elegantly interweaving a multitude of ovoid shapes encompassing a human figure and flattened perspective, and she employed a lyrical cadence of swirling line and colour. Bob Boyer suggests that Odjig was attracted to the cubist style because of its “disregard for perspectival space, its skewing of the elements and relationships of reality, and its central compositional structure.” [3] Indeed, she may have seen that these modern European art movements reflected a reality, a way of interpreting the world that both resonated with Aboriginal traditions and allowed her to break through the colonialism implicit in the Western realist tradition.
Odjig has also been radical in addressing issues of colonization, the displacement of Aboriginal peoples and the status of Aboriginal women and children, bringing Aboriginal political issues to the forefront of contemporary art practices and theory. This interest began after a move to Northern Manitoba, where she witnessed the sad and difficult life of many Cree people uprooted from their homes. Odjig documented the changes and the people in her “series of the North.” Her fearlessness in portraying the reality of Canada from an Aboriginal perspective has set a standard for expanding the vocabulary of contemporary visual art practice in our country.
Odjig’s experiences as a native woman coming into her own during the volatile 1960s, when Aboriginal artists were beginning to reinvestigate their ethnicity, proved fruitful. Like many artists of the Woodland School, she began to interpret the legends and stories of her people, but soon found that limiting since she wanted to explore her own narrative and share, through her work, her own unique experiences. As Odjig continued to explore her personal style, she took part in her first solo exhibition in 1967 at the Lakehead Art Centre in Port Arthur, Ontario. In 1970 she exhibited at the Canadian Pavilion at Expo in Osaka, Japan, and in 1972, along with Jackson Beardy and Alex Janvier, she was included in a pivotal exhibition, Treaty Number 23, 287 and 1171, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. This momentous show was the first time a Canadian exhibition by Aboriginal artists was featured in a public art gallery rather than a museum.
This was an intense time for Odjig: she created an outstanding and prolific body of work, opened her own gallery, was an advocate for Aboriginal art, and completed several major commissions. She also completed an outstanding series of works on Manitoulin Island depicting the stories and beliefs of Aboriginal people, a daring series of erotic images to illustrate the book Tales from the Smokehouse, which, when exhibited, was closed by police. She was commissioned by El Al Airlines to produce works on the Holy Land, titled the Jerusalem Series (1975-76). Odjig’s trip to Israel had a profound effect on her and was the impetus to push her boundaries and create a more personal interpretation of life and incorporate her interest in women, families and spirituality.
Although Odjig worked and was friends with members of the Woodland School, she found more affinity with the group that she helped form, the Professional Native Indian Artists Association, often called the Indian Group of Seven. Along with Jackson Beardy, Alex Janvier, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray, Joseph Sanchez and Eddy Cobiness, Odjig worked tirelessly to promote the group and change the way the visual arts community regarded the work of Aboriginal artists. Like everyone in the Group, Odjig wanted the work to be acknowledged for its artistic merits, not simply for its “nativeness.” This has remained her lifelong aspiration.
One of Odjig’s most outstanding works is the mural The Indian in Transition (1978), commissioned by the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization). The painting is so large (8’ high by 27’ long) she had to rent a house in which to paint it. It symbolizes the political and cultural revitalization of her people and was the largest canvas painted by a Canadian Aboriginal artist to that date.
Lee-Ann Martin, Curator of Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, describes this pivotal work:
The Indian in Transition takes the viewer on an historical odyssey that begins before the arrival of Europeans, continues through the devastation and destruction of Aboriginal cultures, and ends on an expression of rejuvenation and hope. Odjig’s story unfolds with the figure on the left playing the drum, which symbolizes strong Aboriginal cultural traditions, while overhead is a protective Thunderbird. Then a boat arrives filled with pale-skinned people. The boat’s bow becomes a serpent, a bad omen in Anishnabe mythology.
Next, Odjig depicts Aboriginal people trapped in a vortex of political, social, economic and cultural change. Four ethereal figures rise above the fallen cross and broken drums against a background of a bureaucratic symbol of authority. To the right, a figure, protectively sheltering the sacred drum, struggles free, under the protection of the Thunderbird and the eye of Mother Earth depicted in the top left. Odjig ends the story as it began, with a message of hope and mutual understanding for the future. [4]
Over the course of five decades Odjig has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including a major print retrospective in 2005 organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery (when she was in her late 80s) and a retrospective exhibition of her drawings and paintings organized by the Art Gallery of Sudbury in 2007.
Daphne Odjig’s work has undergone many transitions. She has received numerous honorary degrees, awards and international accolades. But at the heart of this humble, engaging and gracious woman are a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a spirit that has influenced and revitalized the political and creative aspirations of generations of Canadian artists.
Jann LM Bailey is Executive Director of the Kamloops Art Gallery and curator of the national touring exhibition Daphne Odjig: Four Decades of Prints.
[1] Bob Boyer and Carol Podedworny, Odjig: The Art of Daphne Odjig, 1960-2000 (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2001), p. 78.
[2] Daphne Odjig in conversation with the author, January 10, 2007
[3] Boyer, p. 17.
[4] Lee-Ann Martin, E-mail to the author December 19, 2007