Dialogue(s) is a captivating conversation program that brings together artists and cultural workers from diverse backgrounds to engage in meaningful discussions. Two works from the Art Bank collection were rotated through the space at L’Imagier exhibition centre—one in June 2023 and one in January 2024. They were also included in the exhibition Coming into Sight: 50th Anniversary Art Bank Acquisitions, presented in the Âjagemô Exhibition Space until May 2024. These works of art were acquired following the open call for purchases announced in June 2022.
Leah Snyder and Jim Logan engage in conversation at L’Imagier exhibition centre. Photo: Brandon Clarida Image Services
“I am a social statement artist,” Jim Logan shared with the audience that gathered for his talk at L’Imagier exhibition centre in Aylmer, Quebec, last month. During the special evening with the artist, he also shared how he came to this conclusion about his practice along with the painful reasons as to why. Born to a Métis family in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Jim has traversed the country from west to east to central Canada. He spent time as a lay missionary with the Kwanlin Dün First Nation, near Whitehorse, Yukon, and then in Halifax, as the Indigenous curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. He co-founded the Society of Yukon Artists of Native Ancestry (SYANA) and served on the board of the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry (SCANA). Now based in Ottawa, for over 15 years he was at the Canada Council for the Arts, advocating for Indigenous arts as a visual arts program officer.
As an artist, Jim is known for his distinctive aesthetic and accompanying palette. His scenes are chromatic pulsations where the compositional elements, outlined in black, echo the Woodland School technique. As Richard Hill, Senior Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes it, his style is “a folksy post-impression bordering on fauvism.”[1]The vignettes Jim depicts almost always include mountain ranges separating the heavens from the human drama taking place in the forefront.
Often painted in shades of blue, they are muted behind colourful buildings and below epic skies, their peaks and valleys a visual device that binds the individual paintings together as a multi-layered narrative. The ‘slice of life’ scenes typically centre on a Northern Indigenous community, compiled from the artist’s memories of Kwanlin Dün but also a stand-in setting for similar Northern communities. Within the clusters of small homes, the coming and going of daily life takes place. Titles like Bringing in Some Wood, Going to a Meeting or Going Down to the Lake suggest the uncomplicated existence of small-town living. Yet set against the social and state backdrop of residential schools and government neglect, titles such as Home for the Summer, Grandpa’s Helper and Hiding from Black Cars connote a more ominous subtext.
Jim Logan, The One the Elders Kept from the School (2018). Photo: Brandon Clarida Image Services
Communicating realities
The painting acquired by the Art Bank in 2023 and on display at L’Imagier, The One the Elders Kept from the School, is of no exception. Its poignant title is a direct and somber comment on the social and spiritual fractures the Canadian Indian Residential School System has caused. The work speaks to the many accounts of abuse and neglect that the members of the Kwanlin Dün community shared with Jim. He paints the accounts for the viewer to bear witness to. “It’s my way of communicating in a polite and respectful way the realities of poverty, of living within a hegemonic society and reconciling what ‘reconciliation’ is or if one can really ever achieve such [a thing],” he states.
In the work, a lone boy sits on a car with his canine companion, positioned in the middle ground between the overshadowing mountains and an older woman in the foreground. Not far from the boy, she bends down to retrieve laundry from a basket. The clothes line is centre stage, spanning from one side of the painting to the other. Draped on the right side are pants, shirts, towels and one pair of socks. The other side is empty. Jim is careful to include many details that lend to the reality of the scene. A small basket for clothes pins hangs on the left pole. Spread throughout are oil drums repurposed for the collection of refuse; an animal hide is suspended on a stretcher as it dries. A pickup truck, filled up with firewood and jerry cans, dominates the bottom right. Houses form the spine behind the boy, who looks off towards something outside the frame. Smoke rises from some of the chimney stacks.
This mise en scène could be read as quaint, but the artist is disclosing something else: “I have intentionally left subtle hints depicting the harsh living conditions in certain Indigenous communities I have lived in or otherwise became familiar with between 1960 and 1990.” Along with the tiny uniform houses and dirt roads are leaning electrical poles at risk of collapsing into each other and taut wires gone slack; an imposition of infrastructure that fails to provide comfort—broken, unusable. There are no conduits for clean water nor power. He observed how the non-Indigenous community down the road had infrastructure that was operational, and children remained at home without fear of being removed from their families.
Referring to the Requiem for Our Children series, Hill states that the artist’s “sweetness of style” is what “makes the eruption of traumatic subject matter all the more jarring—a violation of innocence at the level of form.” The paintings were first exhibited in Whitehorse, decades before the impacts of residential school became more widespread in the public discourse.
Audience member at Dialogue(s) discussion looking through an exhibition catalogue for The Classical Aboriginal Series, by Jim Logan. Photo: Brandon Clarida Image Services
Redefining art history canon
Another series, Classical Aboriginal, addresses the Western canon of art history that centres European artists and art movements, like the Renaissance, as well as Classical Antiquity and the cultural production of the Greek and Roman Empires. With a tongue-in-cheek approach, the series questions the hegemonic standards by which all global cultural production throughout time is measured.
The pedagogical emphasis of H.W. Janson’s History of Art, first published in 1962, provoked Jim during his art school days. The result was 22 paintings intentionally appropriating ‘iconic’ works held up as the pinnacles of European art. Paintings such as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam or Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe are remixed to become A Rethinking on the Western Front (1992) and The Diner’s Club (No Reservation Required) (1992).
Jim Logan, A Rethinking on the Western Front (1992). Photo: Courtesy Jim Logan
Other titles point to scriptural debates: Jesus Was Not a Whiteman (1992). His reworking of early Renaissance artist Giotto di Bondone’s famous painting, The Entry into Jerusalem (1305), presents an alternative version of Western contact. Giotto’s painting illustrates the New Testament account of Jesus of Nazareth’s arrival by donkey from the Mount of Olives to the Gates of Jerusalem. His followers welcome him with palm branches, one prostrating as he lays down a robe for Jesus to pass on, a gesture of honouring. The triumphant arrival is days before the crucifixion; it is the Biblical event that becomes Palm Sunday. In Jim’s work, Christ Entering Great Plains Culture, Jesus arrives at an Indigenous community, teepees replacing the architecture of Jerusalem. A man wearing a Plains style headdress bends down to lay a hide at the feet of the donkey. In his hand, Jesus holds an eagle feather in a gesture of peace; an Indigenous encounter with the West is radically reimagined.
Advocating for Indigenous artists
As an advocate, Jim has appealed to institutional gatekeepers to acknowledge the contribution of contemporary Indigenous artists. Reflecting on such moments, he spoke of a meeting that he and Canada Council colleague Louise Profeit-LeBlanc had with the National Gallery of Canada’s former director Pierre Théberge—a pivotal moment with regards to Indigenous representation. The result was a commitment by the NGC to program, within the decade to follow, exhibitions for three of “the elders” of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada: Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist in 2006 (curator: Greg A. Hill), The Drawings and Paintings of Daphne Odjig, from the Art Gallery of Sudbury in 2007 (curator: Bonnie Devine) and, in 2018, Alex Janvier: Modern Indigenous Master (curator: Greg A. Hill), from the Glenbow Museum. A fourth, Carl Beam (curator: Greg A. Hill) was also added, opening in 2010. The National Gallery of Canada produced catalogues for all four exhibitions.
It is due to the behind-the-scenes work of people like Jim that the landscape of contemporary art in Canada rises above the predominant colonial narrative. Collectively, we inherit a much deeper, richer story. The transmutation of Jim’s experiences has manifested in an oeuvre that is a call for justice; the work validates a community in pain while welcoming others to acknowledge, even assist, with the burden.
[1] https://canadianart.ca/essays/3-solo-exhibitions-of-contemporary-indigenous-art/
About the Author: Leah Snyder
Leah Snyder is a digital designer and writer with a focus on how artists and art institutions use virtual spaces and digital technology for cultural transformation. She is currently based in Ottawa, a city with a thriving arts community she has come to appreciate and adore.