From the head to the heart:
Alex Janvier opens stunning new gallery.
English Bay Reserve — A bald eagle arrows to the earth. Over the phone, Jacqueline Janvier announces this skittish visitor with joy — but unfortunately, she’s not precisely sure where her overdue husband is.
Alex Janvier had been in Regina a few days earlier, speaking on a panel with American artist/curator Joseph Sanchez, the two being founding members of the Professional Native Indian Artists Association.
Even driving alone, 78-yearold Janvier doesn’t carry a cellphone, and is prone to dropping in on friends and kin down the highways.
He follows the whims of a true and curious elder, liking his freedom for obvious reasons dating back to a childhood in a restrictive residential school near St. Paul, which hacked him away from his family at age eight.
Within Cold Lake First Nations, the Janvier home and their important new gallery sit just down the gravel road from each other along English Bay, north of the city of Cold Lake.
Suddenly, Jacqueline announces: “Oh, look whose red truck just drove by!”
Things happen in their own time up here, as anyone familiar with the north knows, including the gallery’s recent official opening a year into its existence. (The new space replaces the former Janvier Gallery on Lakeshore Drive in Cold Lake.)
Crisp lights ordered from New York finally illuminate Janvier’s familiar expressionist art, which is part of the national identity, including being asked by the Royal Canadian Mint to come up with the look of the 1998 $200 coin.
Janvier, of Denesuline-Salteaux origin, is also a member of the Order of Canada, has a Governor General’s Award, and a heavy collection of other accolades.
The gallery was designed by visionary Blackfoot architect Douglas Cardinal, and the beautiful exhibition space is both modest and gorgeous.
Its outside curves and contrasts are used frequently by both the architect and the painter, enveloping a shrine-like interior where natural light, tinted slightly turquoise from windows higher than Janvier’s work, paints the walls.
The shadows of the aspens outside dance expressively inside, and these shapes echo in Janvier’s abstracts, hung in frames squared and circular.
The place feels unquestionably holy.
It’s also a building where every little detail seems intentional, including the shapes of frames matching the windows above.
“It’s bought and paid for, from none other than the proceeds of the paintings,” Janvier says with level pride under a signature Stetson.
“I’m not a rich man, but I don’t play with what I get. The gallery itself, there’s nothing like it anywhere I know of,” he says, chuckling.
That’s an understatement. Following a skipping-stone series of collaborations dating back to the ’60s, Janvier and Cardinal last worked together on the unparalleled Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, across from Ottawa.
Cardinal designed the breathtaking institution, and on the ceiling of its Grand Hall, Janvier painted Morning Star, which just turned 20. A circular explosion of colour and historical meaning, it’s easily one of the most important artworks in the country.
Just a year older than Janvier at 79, Cardinal, on the phone from his home in Ottawa, remembers how they first worked together.
“We spent a lot of time together in our 30s. We were very much involved in trying to get a better education for First Nations people.
“We threw our heart and soul into that, and we were sort of exhausted. I remember one time Alex and I sat down and said, ‘You know what? Politics is not our thing. Our thing is art.’ We both could make a difference for First Nations images if we chose to be the best in our professions. We both decided we would totally concentrate on architecture and art.
“And so far that’s what we’ve been doing,” he laughs.
Artist Kristy Trinier grew up in Peace Country, and notes that Janvier’s mural at the Sawridge truck stop in Slave Lake — similar to his restored 1975 work lining the wall tops of the Muttart Conservatory — was a beacon to creative people.
“It completely inspired me. There wasn’t a lot of art in northern Alberta growing up. I’d never seen anything like that before.”
She’s now one of the curators at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Calling the Museum of Civilization “our Guggenheim,” she discusses melodies between Janvier and Cardinal. “They have a symbiotic way of thinking of the curvilinear form. There’s a duality in their styles.
The new gallery is “going to be a very significant site, not just for tourism, but as a destination in northern Alberta for people to go and see how he lived and worked. For that to be a collaborative intersection for him and Douglas Cardinal, that’s pretty amazing. It does not need to be in the capital city to be significant.”
Says Janvier: “I feel privileged to be able to do something in this world. It’s really right from an earth level. It’s so basic. People, when they come here, they’re shocked — in the middle of nowhere in the bush!
“But that’s where I live. That’s where all this art starts and comes from.”
“There are very few instances where you get to see aboriginal work in a space designed by an aboriginal architect,” Trinier adds. “He gets to show in a space where he got to collaborate with a peer.”
On the east wall of the gallery is the profile of a bird. Jacqueline calls it an eagle, making her earlier sighting poignant. Her husband has his own vision, taken from the nearby Cold Lake. “He’s got the bird where the circles are,” the painter says of Cardinal’s window design. “That’s the eye. On the outside you’ll see the shape of one of these water ducks.”
Having also designed St. Mary’s Church in Red Deer, St. Albert Place, Edmonton’s Telus World of Science and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, Cardinal weighs in on the symbol.
“I wanted it to feel like a sense of freedom, and I see that in a lot of Alex’s work. The idea that we should rise above everyday mundane things and arise our spirits. That’s what art does. I wanted that feeling.”
Janvier muses: “What I’ve found is between the intellect and the heart, that’s the longest distance. People can go to the moon and back. But to try to go from here to there,” he says pointing at his head and heart, “and then back, that’s a little bit of a problem.”
He laughs again. “And painting is somewhat like that, too. I only have my personal viewpoint and nobody listens to that too much. So you paint. Sometimes I use titles to shape people’s minds a bit.”
With wry titles like Alberta Heath Care, Tulo’ khe: On the Way and Spared, the works in the Alex Janvier Gallery have a freer curatorial bent than his brilliant 2012 AGA retrospective, and his upcoming Oct. 19 show at the Bearclaw Gallery in Edmonton, called Reconnecting. This title refers to a sister show by his old Edmonton peer Ernestine Tahedl, who did the terrazzo murals on the side of the disappearing downtown Post Office. It’s running during the same period at the Bugera Matheson Gallery. The two last showed together in Edmonton half a century back.
The Alex Janvier Gallery is a now a beacon, too, and Janvier sidesteps W.P. Kinsella and mentions Kevin Costner as he alludes to “if you build it, they will come.” As we pack up, like a playful grandparent he comes outside to wave goodbye.
Yet even in this tranquil forested setting, Janvier says cautiously of his surroundings, “it’s space. Beautiful space, a nice lake. But it’s getting spoiled by a lot of these speedboats running around. They’re putting a film of oil on the surface.
“The Earth can only do so much. Its ability is powerful, but when it’s tampered around with, it has ways of dealing back. Human beings could be gone. They could be replaced by ants. Or bugs that are going to clean up our bones.
“Once the water commodity is gone, we’re in trouble. Where do you go, to another Earth somewhere?”
I mention the recent call by the Mars One project, which received more than 200,000 applications for a one-way, permanent trip off the planet. Janvier pauses, then chuckles, “Well, maybe the Indians will get their land back.
“We’re lucky as Canadians — we can just about do anything we can just about do. This is one example,” he says, drawing one of his circles in the air.
“Now the other thing the government can do for me is build a nice paved road right from town to here. It stops right at the reservation.”
He smiles. “If they want to get involved, that’s the one thing they can do.”