Reframed invites us not only to see settler North American art in the WAG’s permanent collection in different ways, but to understand how we see and the power that seeing carries. It asks us to consider our orientation towards the artwork, and to the people and histories it represents.
Throughout the collection, Indigeneity (and the racialized “Other”) appears explicitly and implicitly. Depicted by settler artists, these figures are framed by the dominant colonial attitudes at the time the artwork is created. Reframed traces the shapes these figures take across time and media, from 19th century portraits and landscapes to 20th century ethnographic photography, and into their circulation as a nameless, mass-mediated commodity in the late-20th and early-21st century.
Reframed also asks us to consider what it means for a collection on Treaty 1 territory to hold more representations of Indigenous and racialized people by white settler artists than artworks by Indigenous and racialized artists themselves. At the same time, Reframed positions these historical artworks alongside contemporary artworks by Indigenous and racialized artists, offering new ways of seeing and engaging with them.
Artists include Fritz Scholder, Michelle Sound, Murray McKenzie, Jeffrey Thomas, Rosalie Favell, Meryl McMaster, Caroline Monnet, and many more.
