Art Commons, one of Canada’s largest art galleries, is currently featuring a curated collection titled Indigenous Motherhood and Matriarchy that houses an exhibit with the work of Wicanhpi Iyotan Win (Autumn Cavender-Wilson). The show opened in December 2021, and runs through the end of this week, with the ability to view the entire collection virtually. The collection involves multiple artists, working to highlight women’s resiliency and strength, and is curated by a Cree artist named Autumn Whiteway. Whiteway curated the collection first in 2021, and the current collection is the third installment of artists.
“I would say my piece is definitely one of the more unusual pieces in there. It’s a really beautiful exhibit in that there’s so many different mediums and so many different ways that people approached this topic, and so there’s everything from photography and painting to 3D canvases and sculpture, ranging from highly ancestral traditional styles of artwork all the way up to the very, very modern. Mine is definitely on the more modern end of that,” says Cavender-Wilson. Her own dive into the world of art started when she had her first child, Dacian. “I never wanted to be an artist. I never felt like I was good at traditional, or classic art. So I just very much ignored that until I had Dacian, at which point I realized there’s all of these different cultural items that we’re supposed to make for our babies when they’re born and I had nobody to make those items. I realized I needed to learn how to make them,” she says. Inspired to learn, Cavender-Wilson set out to learn from quillwork masters, traveling to Flandreau to work with Dave and Myrna Louis.
In the years since, she has refined her skills, creating a number of traditional pieces that have only been displayed locally once before through her work as the Arts Program Coordinator for Pezutazizi K’api (Upper Sioux Community). “Mostly because the kind of work I did up until that point was mostly wearable art – moccasins, cradleboards, and those kinds of things specifically made for children and families,” she says. But as time went on, and especially during the quarantine period of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cavender-Wilson began exploring ways in which she could create traditional artwork in a modern way. As she and her partner began exploring the world of NFTs* as collectors, ideas began to form. “One of the things we were talking about is what indigenous methodology or indigenous aesthetic looks like within digital spheres and digital art. Not copy/pasting historical designs and taking pictures of them, and putting them online, but how do we utilize these things as generative art to create something within our traditional methodologies,” she explains. “Through tackling the problem in this direction, I came up with this process that I’ve coined as digital quillwork or generative quillwork.”
The art Cavender-Wilson has created through this method involves running audio files through a computer program that creates patterns from sound. The patterns can then be manipulated into images. The patterns form what looks like traditional quillwork or wrap work, with elaborate patterns symbolic of woven materials. For the exhibit in Calgary, Cavender-Wilson submitted four pieces that she created from audio files from her labor with her second child, Leo. Each of the pieces were created from a different moment during the labor and birthing process – one from the sounds of a contraction during active labor, one of a moment in which Cavender-Wilson’s partner Scott and son Dacian sang to her to soothe the laboring process, another of the moment Leo was born, and one from Leo’s first cry. Each of those audio files produced a distinct, symbolic pattern. The exhibit is housed in its own display in a wing of the gallery dedicated to the Indigenous Motherhood and Matriarchy collection. “They specifically geared the exhibit towards a lot of emerging or non-professional artists, so there’s been a lot of education that Autumn Whiteway and the art gallery have done in terms of helping people write an artists statement, or how to market your work, which has been really sweet and lovely,” says Cavender-Wilson. She admits, humbly, that the most challenging struggle as a fairly new artist has been to self-promote, as it’s a concept that gives her a bit of discomfort.
Cavender-Wilson’s display in Calgary will soon be exhibited in Granite Falls at the K.K. Berge Gallery. Her upcoming exhibit will also include some of the other work she has completed through the digital quillwork process, as well as other pieces she has submitted to galleries and exhibits. “It’s also going to include some of my other physical work, some experimentation of other kinds of artwork I’ve been dabbling with as an artist,” she adds. One of the pieces, in particular, that will be on display in the K.K. Berge Gallery is a digital quillwork piece created from an audio file of Cavender-Wilson’s grandfather, a classically trained musician, singing a hymn from the Lac Qui Parle Hymnal that was sung by the 38 patriots when they swung from the gallows in Mankato. “We brought that song through and when we finally developed the piece, we could see faces and we could see 38 individual faces. So for me, the most rewarding piece of this is not just that I get to run a sound through and get a really cool design. What’s most fascinating and rewarding to me is that when I run this particular song through and begin to pull out certain designs, the designs are reminiscent of the songs that I’m working with. It’s a very encouraging process and it tells me that I’m onto something, and that, to me, is the most rewarding part – that I have a visual representation of something that used to just be a story,” she says.
This exploration of representing traditional art in a modern way has also provided Cavender-Wilson with a way to practice seeing the world through a traditional, yet different artistic lens. “There has been a significant amount of loss in Dakota communities in terms of anything, but particularly in terms of artistic practice, and being able to see the world through a particular art lens. How do you see or tell stories in florals, or how do you see your stories in geometric or pictographs? It’s not a skill that most people have anymore, to look at the world and see those kinds of designs. So for me, a big part of my personal goal has been trying to see the world again through that lens,” she says.
Cavender-Wilson’s exhibit will be at the gallery from March 28th through May 7th, and there will be a reception (date to be announced on the Granite Area Arts Council Facebook page). “There might also be some surprises, I’m definitely very excited about it,” she adds.
The Art Commons exhibit can be viewed on the gallery’s website at https://www.artscommons.ca/whats-on/art-galleries-exhibitions/plus15-galleries.
*Next week’s edition of the Advocate Tribune will feature an interview with Cavender-Wilson’s partner Scott Ryan exploring the world of NFT collecting, with a deeper insight into what NFTs are and how they function in the arts society.