Museum exhibit features native artwork

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Houle_Robert.jpg” caption=”Robert Houle’s work, entitled Palisade II, will be on display as part of the Troubling Abstraction exhibit at the McMaster Museum of Art. Photo by Michael Cullen.”]The McMaster Museum of Art is hosting a public reception on Thursday, Nov. 22 from 6 to 8 p.m. to open Troubling Abstraction, an exhibition of art by Robert Houle, one of Canada's best-known contemporary native artists.

The exhibition of 14 works at McMaster includes Parfleches (medicine bags) Of The Last Supper, a series of 13 paintings that places the Christian story in the context of Indian spiritual tradition, Homage to Norval Morrisseau and Palisade II, an homage to the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee people, who along with other groups, resisted the British during Pontiac's Confederacy.

Houle is widely recognized for his contribution to the history, development and advancement of contemporary First Nations art in Canada, not only in terms of the stylistic genres within which he has experimented, but also in terms of the role he has played as mentor to successive generations of native artists.

He was curator at Ottawa's Museum of Man in the late '70s.

This project is unique in that it returns to Houle's first stylistic impulse, abstraction, and considers it in relation to his intelligent and passionate response to his Saulteaux heritage.

As W. Jackson Rushing III observes, “like his artistic forebears, including Norval Morrisseau, George Morrison and Daphne Odjig, Houle has made of modernism a strategy that enables him to realize contemporary Aboriginal experience and content.”

Houle's work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Canada and abroad since the early 1980s. In the past decade, in particular, a number of breathtaking and important retrospectives of the artist's work have been produced and toured.

Curated by Carol Podedworny, director and curator of the McMaster Museum of Art, the exhibition opens Nov. 22 and runs until Jan. 19, 2008. A complementary catalogue with essays by Mark Cheetham, Gerald McMaster and W. Jackson Rushing III is available.

Troubling Abstraction: Robert Houle was produced in collaboration with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.