GHOST ON THE PRAIRIE
Brett Graham, an artist from New Zealand, has gifted the MacKenzie Art Gallery the sculpture he created of a covered wagon titled Pioneer. The artwork, made from pine and wagon wheels from an antique store, pays tribute to the history of the Prairies.
Maori artist Brett Graham conceived the entirety of his whitewashed covered wagon on the Prairies.
Built in Regina, the artwork called Pioneer was inspired by Saskatchewan history, and includes artifacts found in Moose Jaw.
“The work is about the Prairies, so it’s good that it stays here and people can see it from here. It’s about the history here,” said Graham, who lives in Waiuku in northern New Zealand.
Graham has gifted the sculpture to the MacKenzie Art Gallery, where it will be on display beginning Sept. 2 near the paintings of legendary First Nations artist Alex Janvier.
The piece began as Graham was trying to find common ground with his island home during the first of several visits to Regina. He was an artist-in-residence at Neutral Ground gallery in 2013 and 2014, then part of Performing Turtle Island at First Nations University in 2015. His most recent stay of 10 days ended Tuesday morning.
“Initially I was quite intrigued by the idea of the Prairies and the vastness of the Prairies and being compared to the Pacific Ocean,” said Graham. “Then I started reading about prairie schooners, and of course a schooner is a ship.”
Then he read James Daschuk’s 2013 book Clearing the Plains, which looks at Canada’s history of ethnocide of Indigenous people.
“I was quite intrigued with the notion of Saskatchewan as the breadbasket of Canada,” said Graham, “and yet in that transition phase after the treaties … famine was used as a means of controlling the people.”
Graham’s Pioneer is made from pine and wagon wheels from a Moose Jaw antique store, the old wood in good condition thanks to Saskatchewan’s dry climate.
“Anything like that at home just rots because it’s so humid,” he said.
The piece is something like a settler’s wagon, whitewashed because “I love painting things white,” he said laughing.
Of course, the colour has other significance.
“I often deal with black and white as a metaphor for stereotypes of colour and race,” said Graham, a member of the Ngati Koroki Kahukura tribe.
“It’s about whitewashing of history,” added Graham, who also drew inspiration from Moby Dick.
“That book is really about the conquest of nature,” he said. “In Chapter 42 what they talk about is the colour of whiteness in nature is ghostly … something quite unusual, something that you don’t usually see in nature.”
MacKenzie curator Michelle LaVallee said Pioneer is a “really exciting” addition to the gallery’s already diverse collection of artworks, which range from the local to the international.
This is the first prairie art gallery to have Graham’s work as part of its collection, she said.
“I was most interested in the work because it is about here and particular to here; I thought it was a good place for it to remain,” said LaVallee.
“It does kind of act like a ghost of what might have been here on the plains not even that long ago.”
Pioneer will be displayed Sept. 2 through Jan. 28, part of the gallery’s Transformative Landscapes series featuring Indigenous artists.
As of Sept. 30, the wagon will complement Jeff Funnell’s Notes from the Inquest, which tells the story of a 1988 coroner’s inquest into the Winnipeg police shooting of Wasagamack Cree leader J.J. Harper.