Throughout history, the practice of portraiture has served as a powerful tool to represent oneself and others through painting, drawing, sculpture, or photography. In contemporary art, portraiture extends far beyond resemblance. It has become a way to explore concepts of selfhood, memory, cultural identity, and power dynamics. Artists may use abstraction, symbolism, performance, or digital media to question who gets represented, how, and why. 

 

In this broader sense, portraiture is not just about depicting a face or figure; rather, it is about interpreting identity and negotiating relationships between the subject, the artist, and the viewer. Across this exhibition, portraiture appears through symbolic objects, gestures, environments, ancestral materials, and intergenerational ties, emphasizing that presence can be felt, sensed, and remembered as much as it can be seen.

 

Indigenous Canadian portraiture began with pre-contact visual traditions such as carving, beadwork, and regalia, where identity was embedded in material, land, and kinship rather than likeness alone. During the colonial era, artists like Paul Kane and later photographers such as Edward Curtis portrayed Indigenous peoples through a romanticized, ethnographic lens that reinforced colonial narratives and fixed identities in time. In the mid-20th century, artists including Norval Morrisseau and Shelley Niro reclaimed portraiture to assert Indigenous agency and challenge misrepresentation. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, figures like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster, and Rosalie Favell transformed portraiture into a medium of self-representation and critique. Contemporary Indigenous portraiture now blends traditional, performative, and conceptual practices to affirm presence, complexity, and futurity – shifting control of the gaze back to Indigenous creators.

 

Given this long and complex history, this exhibition examines portraiture through emerging and established Indigenous artists who expand and challenge what a portrait can be. Rather than offering singular or fixed representations, the works presented engage with ancestry, ceremony, land, language, bodily knowledge, and lived experience. Through photography, performance-based mark-making, painting, sculpture, and digital processes, these artists explore how identity and representation are carried across generations, how they are shaped by colonial disruption, and continually reclaimed.

 

With featured artworks by Audie Murray, Brody Burns, David Garneau, Melanie Monique Rose, Torrie Ironstar, and Wally Dion, You See Me – Kiwapamin invites viewers to reflect on the multifaceted approaches to representation through art. Together, the works ask viewers not only to look closely, but to consider portraiture as an act of relation, responsibility, and recognition.

 

Curated by Rowen Dinsmore in collaboration with Wanuskewin.