KANATA: PUSHING BOUNDARIES
Bridging the historical and the contemporary in Anishinaabe art
Meet Barry Ace, an Aboriginal artist who brings together the historical and the contemporary in Anishinaabe art.
From an early age, I have been fascinated with the beauty and the aesthetics of the Anishinaabe cultural arts of the Great Lakes of Canada, in particular, porcupine quillwork, beadwork, splint-ash and birch-bark basketry, clay pottery and traditional dance. My visual art practice draws its inspiration from my Anishinaabeg (Odawa) culture and heritage and from my apprenticeship with strong Anishinaabe women in my family and community who were basket-makers and bead-workers, like my great-aunt Annie Owl Mcgregor. I am a band member of M’chigeeng First Nation, Manitoulin Island (Odawa Mnis), Ont., a vibrant community situated on the largest freshwater island in the world. Manitoulin Island is the homeland of the Anishinaabe (Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi) residing in the six communities of M’chigeeng, Sheguiandah, Aundeck Omni Kaning, Wiikwemkoong and Zhiibaahaasing, which are situated alongside many settler communities, the largest being Little Current.
Coming from a culturally rich community, my art training was not garnered from Western fine art educational institutions, but instead directly from talented and innovative community-based women who taught me to be a maker—to make beautiful objects with my hands. Beginning with splint-ash basketry and later moving onto beadwork, I focused my attention on working with these small glass beads, or,
as they are called in Anishinaabemowin, manidoominens ( little spirit or spirit-energy berries). As I honed and refined my beadwork technique, I began to create more intricate and complex floral motifs for dance regalia with an understanding that the floral motifs represented medicine flowers comprising animate healing
energy. When used in dance at traditional gatherings, it is said that these beaded medicine flowers literally or metaphorically release power for individual and collective community healing. Having entered into the powwow dance circle as a traditional dancer and growing up entrenched in the cultural arts, all of these gifts would coalesce into my future visual and performative art practices.
What made my work unique and innovative, however, was the eventual integration of technology directly into it. After graduating from high school, I enrolled in an electronic technology program at Cambrian College of Applied Arts and Technology in Sudbury in the mid-1970s, working with circuits and electronic components such as capacitors, resistors and light-emitting diodes. I immediately saw a correlation between colourful flat-disc capacitors and manidoominens, the glass beads used in traditional Great Lakes beaded floral motifs. I distinctly remember in my electronic laboratory class playing with four round, flat capacitors and placing them into a floral