Alan Syliboy’s studio move is the public’s gain. The Mi’kmaq artist is having a large and exciting show at the Fraser Cultural Centre Gallery in Tatamagouche to Wednesday because he is leaving his studio of the last eight years. “This is a collection of everything I’ve done dating back to the first week until recently,” he said in a phone interview. As Syliboy has journeyed deeper into his art over the last 30 years, he has opened up new worlds of intense pattern and colour. He tells the story of Mi’kmaq culture and history, of his own soul and of the interconnectedness of human beings and nature. Syliboy’s use of colour is exhilarating in this exhibit that takes up three rooms and one hallway. There are intense blues and greens for oceanic and cosmic imagery, fiery oranges in semi-abstracted, textured landscapes, and yellows in large portraits, including one titled Anna Mae, a masterpiece. Syliboy based this portrait on a photograph given to him by Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Aquash was a Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq activist murdered in the United States in the mid-1970s. “I see her as a warrior spirit.” Syliboy’s patterns are inspired by the Kejimkujik petroglyphs and designs in Mi’kmaq quillwork, textiles and other art forms as his research, once done in isolation, has reached out globally. This exhibit includes beautiful new images of humpback whales on drums and canvases, two white moose paintings that honour the white moose killed this past winter by hunters in Cape Breton and never-before-shown abstracted landscapes, marked by dense texture, bold colour and aggressive line. Two graphic paintings are connected to the Thundermaker multimedia installation, exhibited last fall at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton and nominated for a 2014 Masterworks award. Syliboy lives in Millbrook First Nation but is on his way to Antigonish today to produce the Medicine Show with artist Bruce Campbell at an Antigonish Art Fair event, 6 to 9:30 p.m,. at Chisholm Park (antigonishculturealive.ca). On Monday, he is at the Deanery Project in Lower Ship Harbour, Halifax County, as artist-in-residence with First Nations artists Courtney Leonard, Charles Doucette and Fran Ward Francis in a project exploring connections between the Mi’kmaq people and the whales of the North Atlantic. He and photographer-filmmaker Nance Ackerman have a kick-starter campaign to raise money for a documentary on this project called The Path We Share. As this show attests, Syliboy likes variety as an artist. “I don’t like doing the same type of thing. I try to come at it from a different angle and experiment with colours and textures. Sometimes I’m trying to do paintings backward to my normal way.” All the paintings and drums are for sale. The works can be found at alansyliboy.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 21:15:28 +0000
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