Darcie Bernhardt
In her evocative work, Nanuk Braiding My Hair Before Bingo (2019), Darcie Bernhardt paints us a scene from her childhood in Tuktuuyaqtuq (Tuktoyaktuk), Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT, cross-legged at the feet of her nanuk, her grandmother, who is working her long dark hair into a braid before an evening at bingo. A stack of cards already lies expectantly on the floor. The room feels quiet and reflective from the looseness of Bernhardt’s signature style that intentionally evokes the haziness of memory.
“Because my paintings are memories, they of ten appear ‘unfinished’. I’m tr ying to express the way we recollect images that we’re not completely sure about. They’re often fuzz y, almost empty,” she explains, “I’m [working] to translate what I can remember and how badly I want to remember more.”
Bernhardt, who draws inspiration from ar tists familiar to the Inuit ar t world, such as Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016), as well as those fur ther from home such as Nigerian-American ar tist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, focuses her practice on domestic spaces and depictions of family as well as complex, abstracted compositions. The daughter of a seamstress, the ar tist recalls her early years spent surrounded by sewing patterns as well as elders and ar tists that would come to her home to teach her mother as she learned and per fected her craf t— influences that are represented clearly across Bernhardt’s paintings. “I think what is impor tant for my work now,” she says of these moments’ influence on her work, “is being able to reclaim and rear ticulate my understanding of art, also through trying to reconnect with my culture.”
While much of her practice is inspired by her childhood in the Nor th, some of her recent pieces are guided by her experiences of relocating to the South in 2016 and adjusting to her current home in Halifax, NS. Af ter a week spent learning to swim for the first time in the waters of Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site in Nova Scotia during the summer of 2018, she produced I Learned How to Swim with my Fanny Pack (2018) using a colour palette drawn from the cool eddies of fresh water and the moosehide fanny pack she wore throughout her visit. “I didn’t learn how to swim until that summer because it was the only time the water had been calm enough compared to the rough oceans around Tuk tuuyaqtuq.
It’s a special piece because I was never fully comfor table around water until then.”
Bernhardt’s debut year in the Canadian ar t scene has been a dizzying carousel of achievements. In the Spring of 2019 she graduated from NSCAD University; she opened her first solo show, Ouiyaghasiak, in February at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, NS; following soon after came her March 2019 installation of a charcoal animation at Montreal’s Nuit Blanche Festival in the group exhibition Memory Keepers 1; and the inclusion of a selection of her pieces in Worn Inward at the Ar t Galler y of Nova Scotia in Halifax from June to October.
Adding to her busy year—which also included a trip to Venice, Italy, for the 58th Venice Biennale and a subsequent publication in a special issue of the Inuit Ar t Quar
terly on her experience—Bernhardt was the featured ar tist at the Inuit Ar t Foundation’s
booth at Ar t Toronto 2019, introducing her work to the fair’s thousands of visitors. Her featured works, Jijuu Playing Bingo (2018), Nanuk and Nanogak (2018) and a larger-thanlife vinyl print of her swirling red and blue
Cutting Caribou (2018), offer a small sample of her af fectionate snapshots of her family life growing up in Gwich’in and Inuvialuit communities. Inspired by the hunting and butchering practices of country food, the pat terns of Cutting Caribou (2018) represent shapes and sequences intimately familiar to the artist.
“During the winter and fall we’d harvest all the caribou. I love to create the same abstract forms you’d see while you’re cutting up caribou because I love the colour combinations of the meat, cartilage, sinew and membranes.”
The Ar t Toronto spotlight also enabled the acquisition of Bernhardt’s paintings by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Af fairs Canada and the RBC Ar t Collection, marking the emerging ar tist ’s first major institutional acquisitions, and renewing Bernhardt’s dedication. “At the beginning of this year, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to continue to paint,” remembers Bernhardt. “But now that I’ve taken a breather and learned to ar ticulate my ideas and seen that there’s interest, I’m excited to make more work.”
Through the many forms her visual story telling takes, Darcie Bernhardt invites her audience into her deeply personal process of the reclamation of her cultural, community and familial ties as she expresses them through carefully articulated pattern and colour while capturing the fleeting nature of memory.