O Canada and beaver perfume: Joyce Wieland's art still helps us understand our national identity
CBC
"Canada can either now lose complete control — which it almost has, economically, spiritually and a few other things — or it can get itself together."
Artist Joyce Wieland spoke these prescient words in 1971. They could just as easily have been spoken today. As Canada reckons with questions of national identity — about our languages, Indigenous reconciliation, U.S. relations and the environment — the artist's work and words form a clarion call.
Wieland, who died of Alzheimer's disease in 1998 at 67, was a celebrated and courageous Canadian multimedia artist who worked in paint, film, sculpture, textile — and everything in between.
"I think Joyce Wieland is one of the most powerful forces that this country has produced in the 20th century," Art Gallery of Ontario curator, Georgiana Uhlyarik told IDEAS. "She created, in some ways, the most joyful, hilarious, powerful, biting, difficult works of art."
Wieland's work takes on new meaning as Canada's identity continues to shift, and Uhlyarik is planning an exhibition to highlight the artist's relevance once again.
The AGO will mount a Joyce Wieland retrospective in 2024. In 1987, Wieland became the first living woman to have a solo exhibition at that gallery.
She was accustomed to firsts.
She was already the first living female artist to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, held in 1971.
The opening on Canada Day, then known as Dominion Day, was an extravaganza — there was a 100-piece marching band, live ducks and a giant Arctic Passion Cake, a 1.67-metre iceberg-shaped cake.
Impossible to miss were Wieland's signature Canadian flags. Then still a nascent symbol, Wieland stuffed, stitched and stretched the red maple leaf and its meaning.
The exhibition was called True Patriot Love, and the theme was Canada itself.
On the surface, some of the works could be misconstrued as fluff. In truth, this was Wieland tackling the most pressing questions of nationhood and what it means to be Canadian. She did so with her signature humour, going so far as to create a fragrance for the occasion: Sweet Beaver, the Perfume of Canadian Liberation.
Reactions in the press were divided. Some critics saw the perfume-infused event, with its cake and ducks and hanging quilts, as an egregious, childish watering down of the esteemed National Gallery.
"Some of the newspaper critics were quite vicious and misogynist," noted Johanne Sloan, art historian at Concordia University. "One of the Ottawa papers had a headline that was something like, 'Joyce the housewife brings her cushions and blankets into the gallery.'"
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