To Swerve and Reject
Roger Crait

I am an expressionistic painter who, often with satire and social commentary, paints my urban Aboriginal life and apocalyptic fantasies. In one of my thickly painted works, a space shuttle hurtles toward a city of skyscrapers and tepees. Sometimes text intrudes, as in my series of word paintings which coins words like ‘staboriginatives,’ ‘colonial mop,’ or my signature MT, a cultural appropriation signifying the Trademark logo™ in reverse (coining phrases like Meaningless Treaties, Métis Tradition, Many Things, or Empty). Being a Status Indian of Métis heritage living in an urban setting, I leave the viewer to take on the many possibilities of my examples of suggested acronyms.

Métis by blood and Status Indian by registration card, I know very little of my own ancestry aside from what I’ve read in books. As yet, I do not understand traditional ‘Native Art’: the symbolism, the meaning of colours, the mark-making. I was not born, raised, nor have I ever lived on a reserve. I’ve heard that if you did something bad in a Native community, there was no concept of ‘jails,’ instead they took your jacket (tribe colours, barcode number… whatever) and slashed it up in the open for everyone to see. So when you went to another community, people would know you were not worthy of belonging. Sometimes living in the city, I feel as though I don’t belong. I am at a spiritual loss and feel like a stranger in my own country. Once I went to visit an elder and asked him if he would like to see my paintings. He agreed. He took a single glance and immediately said, “Oh, you’re Cree.” When I asked him how he knew this, he responded, “Because you paint with the colours of the Cree.” Never before had I seen what Cree colours looked like, not in books, not on the Net and not in real life. I thought about what he said and realized how tightly our genes are engrained in us and, for just a moment, I felt spiritual.

My work has been exhibited at professional galleries locally (Manitoba), nationally (Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick), and internationally (Fowler Museum UCLA, Los Angeles and Boomali Art Centre, Australia). In 2006 I had the opportunity to expand my art practice with two firsts: performance art, and installation art. My first performance, Poor Life of Dismay presented at Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, was based on a day in the life of a young Aboriginal born and raised in Winnipeg, a culturally diverse, but problematic and inevitably exacerbating city that has the largest population of Aboriginals in Canada. I attended the University of Manitoba in the Fine Arts Diploma Program from 1995 to 1999. I currently live and work out of my studio in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Exhibition Date: April 17 to May 24, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 17, 7 to 10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 19, 1pm

gallery   Judy Anderson   Arch Enterprises