Archives, Bones, and Polaroids
Congratulations to Lois Taylor Biggs on winning the inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, presented by C Magazine and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. This initiative was created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals in the first decade of their writing practice who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. We sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Jac Renée Bruneau, Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Adrienne Huard. Stay tuned for writing from the runners-up, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Kelsey Borgford, in issues 152 and 153.
The late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais understood stories through the body. Former Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) curator Liz Park relayed his worldview in a 2014 blog post on the museum website, writing that Metchewais believed some stories are highly visible but “ephemeral and forgettable”—that, like hair, “they grow and are stuck on you, but eventually they’ll fall out and be swept away.”1 Others, however, get “etched into your ribcage” and can never be excised. “They stay with you permanently even if they cannot be seen.”2
This haunting formulation reflects Metchewais’s own creative practice. Throughout his career, Metchewais told stories that could not be swept away. He maintained a vast archive of Polaroid images, which he used as material for wall-sized collages, multimedia installations, and other smaller works. These images, which featured places, community members, and the artist article “Kimowan Metchewais’s Search for Visual Sovereignty,” art historian Christopher Green describes this process as a ceremonial act, citing the artist’s description of well-known collage series (2004–06) as “a kind of prayer.” Through such ceremonial, material acts, Metchewais blurred the boundaries of the body and the archive for the purpose of healing.
