The McMichael’s not-so-odd couple
Pioneer of feminist art has unique kinship with woodsy painter Tom Thomson
Passion Over Reason at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art begins, appropriately, with an embrace: Tom Thomson, the woodsy icon of a Canadian painter, bundled up in the arms of an earth goddess, the splendour of nature bursting in bright colour and form below them.
Let it not be said that the late Joyce Wieland, the maker of this particular piece, had no sense of humour (Thomson’s wearing red-and-black buffalo check, a Canadiana cliché if there ever was one). Her work, which could be cheeky, absurd and fullblooded, was the product of the potent marriage of the head and the heart. Close to the latter was her home and native land, which she explored with a doggedly affectionate dismay.
Which is why, I suppose, we find her here at the McMichael, in this moment of Canada 150, coupled this month with another anniversary, the 100th of Thomson’s untimely death. The gallery may be killing two birds with one stone — its dedication to the nationalist mythology of Thomson and his Group of Seven painting cohorts is well-documented — but it’s no reach.
In a lovely little confluence, Wieland, in her own way, was as enamoured of Thomson as the McMichaels, the gallery’s founders. Her expansive wit and passion is exactly the antidote the gallery needs to not only fulfil its duty on this morbid centennial but, critically, bring it into the here and now.
Passion Over Reason is billed as a two-hander between Wieland and Thomson, but even with its generous sprinkling of Thomson works — mostly his uncanny oil sketches, some of the most energizing work ever made in this country — it’s really a Trojan horse for Wieland, who died in 1998 at age 67, far from when the end should have come for one of the most compelling careers in Canadian contemporary art.
The show is a stroke of sly subversion by chief curator Sarah Stanners, stamping Wieland’s passport into an institution that once went to the Supreme Court to keep works like hers out, but the alliance is far from forced. As Tom Thomson and the Goddess, the show’s opening salvo, makes clear, Wieland’s interest in her painterly forebear was deep indeed, and it generates much of what “Passion Over Reason” has to offer.
Right beside Goddess, a few dozen of Thomson’s unearthly sketches are sprinkled across an expanse of wall, as though scattered by the wind. The installation, a sort of sacrilege in this temple of wilderness painting, is a nod to Wieland’s 109 Views, an array of small landscape works stitched into a single tableau that she had made from scraps of fabric, similarly displayed.
Both a lover of history and a disrupter of convention, the artist cheekily insinuated herself into the hoary Canadiana myth of macho wilderness painting by crafting it in the language of traditional “women’s work,” using fabric and quilting techniques. It was a strategy that served her well. Nearby, her 1988 fabric collage Entrance to Nature drips with thickly fecund intent. It’s hard not to think of Group member Arthur Lismer’s Undergrowth, from 1946, and hard to believe Stanners wasn’t: A photo of Thomson and Lismer hangs right beside it.
Wieland tucks nicely into the Group of Seven story as an artist who both embraced and rejected it in equal measure. If she wasn’t content with the ruling narrative of Canadian art as male and painterly (and she wasn’t), as her career began to blossom in the late 1960s, she was able to relate on the common ground of conservation and the ongoing ruination of the land that Thomson and co. had so exhaustively lionized.
In a moment of optimism under Trudeaumania (the show’s title is a reversal of his famous “reason over passion” speech), Wieland felt acutely that something was very wrong: In the video piece Reason Over Passion, Wieland filmed snippets of the Canadian landscape on a cross-country journey as seen from the window of moving vehicles. To underscore the widening chasm between people and nature, she put a flash of subtitles that jumble her title (“Raneso vero isapson”), putting fractured words to her disconnected view.
It encapsulated her own frustration with the building ecological disaster (“there are hamburgers and shoes in the water,” she once said, in dismay, about the over-trammelled waters of Algonquin Park) and a disconnect unacknowledged in the country’s dominant art of the day. Thomson’s work has had upon it projected an idealized notion of wilderness, making it easy to forget he was painting amid clear-cuts and forestry concerns advancing into the heart of the wild. He shared her complaint, and she his passion.
As an emblematic icon, Wieland embraced both Thomson’s complications and his strengths. Her 1976 feature film The Far Shore features a sullen painter named Tom, ill at ease in the city, who chooses the wild over a love of a woman. (She had her own choice: Over her husband, a buttoned-up business type, she chose Tom, only to be rejected. “Would you paint me if I were a tree?” she asks him, a double-entendre if ever there was one. “Well, at least I’d have a chance,” he replies.)
Stanners overplays her hand here and there, straying from the promised two-hander with more and more Wieland. You can hardly blame her: The show veers off into pale pink room devoted to the artist’s more visceral works, which include nudes. It reads mostly as an excuse to display Heart On, her 1961 work of a rumpled bedsheet fitted with cutout hearts and stained with blots of red (for the record: this is not a complaint; it’s perhaps the most powerful thing here).
Wieland wasn’t ambiguous in describing the stains as menstrual blood, and it’s a standout moment of many of a woman artist staking her claim in a man’s world. With lateabstract female painters such as Helen Frankenthaler still making ghostly ambiguous canvases under the rubric of detached formalism, Wieland responded with a declaration of her feminine self, and an admonishment for those not willing to self-declare.
It wasn’t the only thing she declared. In the fertile late-’60s moment of identity politics, Wieland, with her conservationist ethic, was clear the she believed Indigenous people were the best stewards of the land and water that her own kind were quickly destroying. She incorporated Inuits’ language in her text works decades before most of her peers were aware of their plight, and inserted a poem in Inuktitut in her 1971bookwork, True Patriot Love, for the National Gallery of Canada (“The Great Sea has set me in motion/set me adrift . . . And I am left/Trembling with joy.”)
This seems to be leading somewhere, but instead the show kind of peters out, ending on Thomson’s almost pornographically beautiful Woodland Waterfall, from 1916. It’s a spectacular piece, but given the tease of Wieland’s prescient politics just moments prior — not to mention the shakeout of the fraught Canada 150 moment — it feels like a box being checked on an old McMichael list.
Wouldn’t it have been more fitting, and more energizing, to bring in a voice the likes of which Wieland meant to enable — an Inuit artist such as Shuvinai Ashoona, with her fantastical imaginings of the land as a living thing, or Tim Pitseolak, who saw it with a plain-spoken affection and concern, not unlike Thomson.
In an adjacent hallway gallery, Norval Morrisseaus are ganged up by the dozen, the Anishinaabe icon having a thing or two to say about land, passion and Canada himself. But that, it seems, is another story. The McMichael is making great strides, and Passion Over Reason is a big one. But, I suppose, one step at a time. Passion Over Reason continues at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art until Nov. 18. See mcmichael.com/ event/passion-over-reason-tomthomson-and-joyce-wieland.