so I just want to welcome everyone um my name is Shauna mccab and I'm the director of the art gallery of galf um and I'd like to welcome you all as well as our guest ran chaon and anong beam um tonight and tonight um I'd like to begin by offering a l acknowledgement on behalf of the art gallery of gal which is hosting this dialogue um the statement is really crucial for cultural institutions um as it really speaks to the ongoing um effects of colonialism that underpins the the history of of muse
ums and art museums um not only have cultural institutions utilized deeply Colonial methods of representation but because of their Authority these narratives have often been accepted as truth informing policies and practices which have ongoing effects so galf is situated on treaty land that is steeped in Rich indigenous history and home to First Nations Inu and mate people today um and as we gather together virtually virtually tonight I'd like to acknowledge that the gallery resides on the treat
y lands and territory of the Miss sagas of the credit we also recognize we reside within the dish with one spoon territory and offer our respect to our annab hodon and mate te neighbors as we strive to strengthen our relationships with them we express our gratitude and recognize our responsibility for the stewardship um uh of the lands um on which we live work and create and as we're all connected um and yet physically dispersed it's also a good moment to recognize our Collective responsibility
um to the calls um to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on indigenous residential schools to never forget to hold um governments um and uh Colonial forces to account and to seek redress and healing for injustices and this is a legacy um that was Central to the life and work of artist Carl beam who uh who's our our Focus tonight before we turn it over to rayan to start um um I briefly wanted to tell you a little bit about each of them as and they will tell you more um ran C
hon is a mate curator based between Hamilton and Toronto with over 12 years of experience curating multidisiplinary and Intercultural exhibition showcases festivals and programs she's currently serving as the hatch curator of indigenous art and culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and she previously served as the curator of indigenous art at the MCM sorry McMaster Museum of Art from 2017 to 2023 her most uh recent exhibitions include NEPA 2020 um what sustains Us co-curated by ainc and uh we are
made of Stardust uh and guest curation of the 2022 official selection for imaginative uh film and media arts festival broadly her curatorial work focuses on the practice of survivance indigenous epistemes relational Aesthetics representational politics uh a acknowledgement and gratitude um let's see here so par uh parallel to her curatorial work Shalon serves as a sessional instructor at McMaster at Toronto metropolitan University and the University of Toronto she's a co-founder of the shush shu
shu Collective an equity-seeking and advocacy group organizing on behalf of matey Artis and art workers to increase matey representation capacity and flourishing with in the Canadian Arts milu previously she served as a board member and secretary with the indigenous curatorial Collective from 2018 to 2022 she's a citizen of the mate nation of Ontario and her paternal family names are charton and J anong beam was raised by artist parents Carl beam and Anne beam uh with a meaningful connection to
both her artistic familiar roots and ancestral heritage her artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions often in the form of oil paintings that incorporate um different imag making approaches including photo transfer print making and collage um which have been shaped by the physical history of her home its surrounding Landscapes as well as the relationship between water and memory in addition to her artistic work uh be has been actively involved in uh the local community of
shaging on manit tulan island and is well known for her curatorial work in 2007 she was one of the founders of an English and ajibu language radio station in Mig First Nation TW from uh 2016 to 17 beam served as the art director of theju cultural foundation and in 2017 she uh transitioned to become the executive director later that same year um beam also launched her own line of watercolor and oil paints which are now famous called beam paints um be has also been an outspoken advocate for the pr
eservation of indigenous archaeologies and Indigenous Ceramics within local communities so I'll turn it over to you ran Mar sha um it's great to be here I'm so glad that we were able to reschedule this talk um I know I'm super excited to have this conversation with you and Nong I hope you're equally excited to have this conversation with me um so yes welcome everyone um this conversation was prompted by an exhibition that uh just recently closed actually at the art gallery of gal um called Carl
being pieces of a puzzle which was curated by Sally frer who at the time was the curator of Contemporary Art uh with the AG and so in conversation with Sally um uh and and myself and anong we decided we wanted to do a chat about Carl's work and his life his legacy and his contributions to indigenous art so that's what we're here to talk about today is all the amazing things that um Carl has gifted us through his practice um in in just so many different ways and I myself have um curated his work
several times and I find myself constantly returning to his uh his body of work because I think it's just so rich with things to talk about so I'm sure we'll get into a bit more of that um but anong I welcome hi yes thank you so much I'm super happy to be here and uh I I know a lot of uh things have moved around and this is rescheduled but I'm really grateful that we're getting a chance to do it and and uh we had a little test conversation before and it was so much fun so I'm really really happy
to be here and to talk about uh my really my favorite artist and uh my dad whose practice I I feel the same way about that I I'm keep keep learning about and understanding more as as I progress in my own career and my own interests and also as I cross a lot of uh Milestones that I saw him go through like certain ages and certain ages of children and certain things like exhibitions and and things and I think about him quite often um and we talked about this before but I guess I would mention it
that we do have an upcoming publication uh about coral beam art and life and it should be coming out soon in some form or another it'll be out I can't wait I've known about this for so long that I'm just like waiting eagerly to have the book yeah so it's h he's very much on my mind and we're coming up on onto uh I think it's been about 30 years since a lot of the the the big exhibitions that he did and so many things have happened in the past few years that really reference and relate to his art
work so I'm I'm really happy to be having this conversation with you oh I'm so excited I'm I I think we've got some images we'll kind of shuffle through as we go but for now um I just want to give a shout out to Sally frer for supporting this conversation Nicole and Shauna at AG as well and the whole social media team for um kind of getting behind this and helping us make this happen so I guess my where I kind of want to start um is kind of thinking back to what it was like growing up with Carl
so you know it goes without saying that he's arguably or not arguably undoubtedly the most important contemporary indigenous artist of the last 70 years um but to you he was he was Dad um so what was it like growing up with such an incredible mind and maker you know it's something that I kind of unpack more and more uh as I go on and definitely itely becoming a parent myself yeah and it's taken me a really long time I really to understand some of the The Oddities I think of it that he was a surv
ivor of residential school and that that itself inflicted an awful lot of of things that he had a certain level of PTSD I think we couldn't we couldn't go into High large buildings he had a really tough time with institutional looking buildings if we stayed in hotels we couldn't go in the elevator we had to take there had to be stairs out so you could never feel trapped so I guess and always needed to know how to get out of a building and I just kind of took that as a normal way but it it's you
know that definitely comes from that experience that and he was just so he was so multifaceted there's so many artists I think who uh specifically work in one medium or one practice and his his life even though it was like he knew he didn't have a lot of time and he actually had a few different interactions with people in like a community setting where his community believed and his family knew that he was going to do something important and he had the feeling that he wasn't going to live a real
ly long time when he met my mom he actually said he felt like he was probably GNA pass away in a few years yeah so he didn't think that he was going to be there very long and he ended up lasting a lot longer than he thought but still it was less less than than we would have liked so there was like a there was an uh there was a tension to the time that there really was a feeling like there was no time to lose yeah like a looming sense of immediacy or or the need to like experience the fullness of
Life while he could yeah and he was so um he was so aggressively intellectual and serious about his Pursuit our our house in the early early days when he did the Columbus Suite which is heavily referenced in this exhibition we had no furnit in the house except a kitchen table and chairs but there was no there was no couch there was no television there was no sofa or there was an Etching Press in the living room and the kitchen table and that that was it and futons on the floor so he continued w
ith that same that same Focus all the way through and even up until the time that that I took over the house after he passed on there still wasn't a couch in the house you never had one he never wanted to to sit idle let's say oh he never wanted to sit like he would sit down maybe and play guitar he really enjoyed music but but there was always uh there was always something that had to be done and even if it was just thinking and that's something that I think was uh interesting too that he made
such a space for for thinking and he would say something he said people think that they're thinking all the time but they're not he said there's this take learning an idea and then pondering that is not having an original thought and he said very rarely does anyone ever have a truly original thought and if you could have one in your life that would be a really great accomplishment to get an original thought so even to think that is really odd for you know uh an Norther Ontario man who really was
n't on a path to become an artist he was on a path to be a a a laboring person to work in the trades and and he took such a massive uh massive change in his life towards art but all of that sort of that pathway to becoming a laborer or or we could say even a maker a doer I think do see that in his work and in his willingness to kind of just experiment with all things and and nothing kind of seemed off limits to curl as we were talking in in our pre-chat you know even delving into Ceramics like I
'm I'm so excited to explore that more and I've seen the old cataloges from the 80s of he was doing the steric simultaneous to his works on canvas and his etching so it was never like he just did one thing at one time to your point he was kind of doing all things all at once whatever whatever the medium could convey the message yeah and things were happening with such a such a thickness and an intensity and you know part of that is because he he didn't have a professorship or a yeah and I think
the he probably would have have he was on track for that he was at that time you know from our community at least there weren't a lot of people going to Art School it was pretty unusual and then he was on track to do an MFA and proba that probably would have led into something but I think when they rejected he proposed to do a thesis on Fritz shoulder and he oh wow okay I I didn't know that that is so fascinating he proposed it to do the thesis and he was told by the university that he would hav
e to pick a like a European artist that wasn't serious enough it it wouldn't have enough validity to be a thesis project and that was like Wow and he just he walked away and that's when became his professional he started being really became professional as an artist so he that closed the door to Academia that he didn't want to pursue and the intensity of needing to take care of your family as a practicing artist without another job my entire life I never saw him or my mother work a have a job be
yond their own art so it's funny they both referenced it in different ways in their journals and things which are really neat one of them my dad's Journal was really neat there's a page that's a a sequential itemization of everything that he has and doesn't like a an inventory right down to he only has like 78 cents or something yeah and then at the end he says it's a beautiful day and I'm outside playing with this kid across the street and he he says I really need an intervention like a Divine
I need I need something come to me MH and that was about the time I think he was working on the Columbus project and he he was really encouraged by my aunt uh he thought he was going to sell the sell the Etching Press and she said get to work that's what you need as an auntie to tell you what to do yeah yeah and he he did he got to work and and uh you know this this this amazing body of work came about yeah yeah so this one is uh sitting bow and Einstein um so this one I I believe is all this wa
s part of the Columbus Suite correct yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry there's my images are out of order as was this one this one was floating around on social media as as a promo image for um for the talk um yeah kind of interesting this when it's hard to read the text on there but it had something about uh it was something about his dear Columbus and something about the voyage being doomed from the beginning and uh I think that that's my favorite thing about Carl's work is we're jumping ahead all ove
r my question that's okay but um I I think that that's the one thing I absolutely love about his work is the fact that he he annotates and he comments and he shares his thoughts and it's like it's at times like free verse poetry and I love that because as a very cerebral intellectual person I I I connect in with that and he engages me in thinking about those ideas with him and I think that's why I come back to his work so much because I take something away from it each and every time I I complet
ely agree and it's something in the forthcoming book about his work that I talk about more extensively that he was an incredibly literary and our our house is is full of books even when we had no furniture we had a big bookshelf with a lot of books we were always going to libraries we were going to use book sellers there was an awful lot of reverence for reading and and books and there's so many works of uh philosophy and so many philosophic texts that he was really reading and going through and
I think there's like seven copies of hi Digger's being in time in the house seven or more and he just loved he loved reading of those ideas and something that's interesting too he also loved James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and uh differ approaches to literary constructions which considering English is his second language as well he also learned some Latin at the Spanish residential school too and something that I love about his text is he was almost never discussed as a text based artist but the
re's text as visual device in every single work I mean I am really hard pressed to find any work that's not a study he has water color studies maybe with no text but finished work that was presented to the public almost entirely without exception has a text based aspect and none of it was planned ahead it was all stream of Consciousness I remember you telling me that and I found that so fascinating it's so amazing right because these are really final things like he's writing in ink on paper and
you can't go back and erase sometimes he'll scratch out a word yeah I've seen that I've seen that every once in a while he'll scribble went out but by and large even on the big oil paintings he's writing an oil on canvas and it was straight stream of Consciousness from that moment which I think really really put his uh it it just creates an intimacy that lasts through through time because the immediacy and my mom she was so in love with him and so in love with his art that there journals that sh
e she has inscribed this is dedicated or uh this is it's basically dedicated to the creative spirit and my husband Carl and as it flows through him and she documents uh transcribes the work a after he's written it so a painting is about to be sold to an art gallery or a collector she takes her notebook and she copies down the text from the work and there's that that neat uh record of some of these things that have gone off into the secondary Market no I love that because yeah if they they're col
lected by private collectors you lose access to that so it's so amazing Ann was able to you know thought ahead and like took the time to to transcribe all that from from the works yeah they were so they were really they documented that time and their work so so thoroughly that yeah think the seriousness that they took their work and each other really left an incredible Legacy their their photographic Archive of all of the early 80s through to the 90s is it's thousands and thousands of photograph
s is this a pre-digital era if you don't have money for gas and a couch and you know things like that but you're buying color film and you're documenting your artwork like that's where the priorities were have you ever this is a total personal question because I'm I'm my kind of bread and butter is Art in the 80s specifically photography has anyone have you thought to do anything with the photographic archive they have well it's all been digitized so that's amazing and The Originals were all don
ated well technically they still belong to me but they're they're at the National Gallery the archives there and I I really want to make them accessible to the public for research because a lot of these there were photographs of him at land spirit Power in and there's pictures of him clowning and having fun with all of the artists there and oh I would love to see those that would just be like one of those iconic moments you know you're like I wish I could have been there but I was only a kid Yea
h well yeah and it was really incredible to be there to be there with them and when I was there I was a kid it was really funny and amazing because they knew they knew how it was so it was it was just such an intense time yeah so as an artist yourself you know in what ways do you feel that Carl influenced your own practice I mean I think both your parents did most undoubtedly and and I know um that he your mom and your dad kind of inspired being Paints in some way because they were creating thei
r own their own pains early on so just maybe a little bit about you and how they've influenced how you approach your art yeah definitely I think um you know it took me a long time to kind of find my own my own style because uh you know they were both they both had such a i i I think I I understand now I learned more as an apprentice versus the current state of of Education in North America is very uh Academy based so I had more of like a cfts person's education in art which is really process-bas
ed and and you start by kind of working like the people you're apprenticing to my early work really looked un awful lot like my mom and dad's and then somewhere around the time that my my sons were born I really came into I felt like I I developed my own way of seeing and relating in a visual way and I really felt like I was able to claim space that my dad carved out because there he he really struggled with the the Art Market and the expectation the expectations of what native art should look l
ike and I think this kind of Loops back into your question later about uh about self-portraits but there were there was so many times where I remember him showing work to potential collectors and they would just be like what what is this show are you I need to see some some Indian art and this is not it and he would say like he would he was an incred like he was a really bomb bastic very large individual and it's so funny because people always remember him taller than he was or just he was just
he took up a room and I had seen him be incredibly Brusque with people uh like you know that's the lightest way to say it where he he would just tell them where to go and somehow it wouldn't he would say it in the full full four letters and somehow it would be like they wouldn't even land on them they would go like oh and so he would he he he they wouldn't be rebuffed they would come back and they would want to know why and then there would be conversations it was really interesting yeah this wo
rk here is big meal it's to work on canvas um so as anong was saying you know you Carl recurrently used self-portraiture in his work and I think that that's one of the things things I I quite love about his work as well is kind of turning the Gaze on himself and really critiquing that idea uh of of who and what is quote unquote indigenous and I I do think that gets into one of the questions that I I had about how this sort of tension between you know the Art Market expecting something of Carl ex
pecting a certain type of Art and him just basically you know two thumbs two fingers up to that idea and really carving out a space of his own for what he wanted to say and I do think that goes back to what you were alluding to in terms of apprenticeship um and him being a self-taught artist and so you know in what ways do you think like not go you know following an academic path freed him or restricted him in terms of his creative thinking and practices making practices well it's interesting be
cause he he definitely he was this blend of self-taught and and school because he did go he did go to art school he went he got his BFA he was about to get his MFA he you know went to more Art School than I I did and I think that uh at the moment when he couldn't continue further it almost Echoes this thing that happened to him before when he was in residential school and it comes to this point where you're supposed to go along in that system until you you know until you get to the end and he en
ded up dropping out but instead of being a a Dropout who went and worked for you know doing labor jobs he rejoined in grade 10 through correspondence he ends up graduating ahead of the class if so he completes the studies faster on his own than he would have actually in school and I think that happens when the door shut on him in MFA he he's so voracious about uh pursuing himself as a serious artist and seeing himself that way then something happens around the time around 1984 85 it's posts this
big love story with my mother where they they meet and they run off to the states and they're Mar they're they're married two months after they met and then like nine months later I'm born and they're moving around and it's very the photographs of the time are like just incredible because they're so very much in love and they're they're painting together and his work really it brightens and I think uh the works just before that were very pessimistic yes I've curated some of those yeah I think s
ome of them are called one of them is called pathetic and the other one is called like it has NE uh a lot of negative negative stuff in there yeah yeah and then he goes into Stellar associations and new I love that work that's like one of my alltime faves yeah and he he comes through all of that and he gets to this point where he starts to discover I I mean literarily he knew the work uh the Anne Frank's diary but through the exhibition he has that goes to uh it's exhibited at the merart in Holl
and and forgive me if I get something wrong here I don't have any notes but we go to an Frank's house and I'm five and we're there and it was really it was really intense for him and and it was intense for me because at that point he had already given me at five years old he'd already given me the Diary of Van Frank and I'd already read it and you know there was so much reading going on at the at the house it's it was just really very literary at that point he starts to make these connections he
gives a he gives a um a a press conference in front of the ant Frank house and I have photographs of this like it really happened there were all these cameras and he was there and he tells the European press about Canadian residential schools and he starts talking about how there is this ongoing abuse of power and that the Lessons Learned here need to be transmitted back and all of that and that's that's 1985 so he comes back to Canada and it's still no one is saying anything about these experi
ences he he's really freed by reading that whole experience he's inspired and he starts to relate his own experience his his trauma in a incredibly diary based personal way and that goes into this incredible thing that very few very few uh indigenous artists or let's even say very few artists who have been pop from a population a marginalized population are able to relay that experience to The Wider public without creating uh shameful you know with without being like Oh you for shame on you this
happened to me instead there's an amazing way that he could approach his own experiences while including the viewer that the viewer the viewer didn't feel like they were being chided or instead they felt that they were they were with him and they were going on this this uh this journey of understanding it's it's I don't even really understand all of the mechanisms that have to happen to create that that connection and that personal the personal connection that's it's beyond space and time it's
what happens in great art he he struck that balance between like the personal and political so well and commenting on these broader Global issues and and tying that to some sort of personal narrative some sort of personal reflection on the world and I think he did that successfully over and over and over again and I remember in one of our pre discussions you were talking about him being really interested in semiotics um and you know that brings up this conversation of his recurring use of religi
ous imagery and iconography as a critique for organized religion and its effect on indigenous peoples but he found that way to kind of like critique Western culture and Christianity whilst also in advanced an indigenous view but it was never heavy-handed to one or the other and I guess was semiotics the solution I don't I think so because I think what like one of my favorite some something that I kind of come to understand later and this is through talking a lot with him about language and uh he
was active in starting a radio station that I worked on with him later that was just a jway language and I think like when you look at these works here and you see especially on the the right to the right of sitting Bol the The Unexplained yeah if you imagine his experience to be you know eight years old and all of a sudden dropped into a a Jesuit Catholic existence that's only happening in English where he's also the alter boy so he's participating in uh in incredibly intense symbolic rich wit
h symbols that he has no no understanding of and it's just coming as a barrage of symbols and I think when you whenever you encounter the other you don't have access to the meaning of all of these semiotics it it's it's kind of like what happens when they say if a child learns one language the child understands the word for apple and the object of the apple as being the same thing if you have a child that learns in a bilingual situation they understand that the word apple is not the Apple they u
nderstand the difference between the word and the object so I think that's something that he was using semiotics to question the privilege of viewpoints that one active power one Act of Faith equals one Act of Faith is how he would explain the explained and I love that uh in there's an there's a painting with the same imagery and it's at the National Gallery of Canada and it says that in Greek at the top so everyone when they see it they're almost forced to to to feel the way he felt observing s
omething see being text not understanding or trying to make connections yeah no I find that so fascinating I think you know one of the the lenses through which I have studied Carl's work and then subsequently curated is through the the the lens of survivance or the proxies of survivance of the sort of doing of of cultural resistance and not just surviving but thriving and one of the things that I really loved about Carl's work particularly through the 80s and into the 90s but other artists were
doing this too in their own ways was this sort of um not only with text and text as a visual language but um using other languages in their works even in the case of someone like Jane Ash portra who was using cre cabic to highlight this incommensurability or this untranslatability of of certain Concepts and it goes both ways like to your point point you know putting Greek in his work you know limits who can actually understand that and then I think that does in some way impart to the visitor lik
e what it feels like to be stuck in in these situations of of you know mistranslation or or a lack of ability to understand and what that like feels like yeah and then what that means about assuming which like the the privilege of which one is assumed to be accurate or dominant in in a situation I I found that really interesting when he continued on afterwards learning Sanskrit and he had a Sanskrit journal and had a few he had one uh I think it's at the arch alley of Ontario and it's called bos
mic or reduced to ashes and it has uh it references residential school experiences and it has images of of Chiefs and archival Indigenous images and then it says written in Sanskrit reduced to the it's there's no English on it it's the Sanskrit syllabics and it says it means reduced to ashes so yeah it's really it's really fun to go through his work you know even myself being a constant student of him for my entire life I I find different aspects and different different meanings I as the years g
o on and it's really it's really fun yeah so I just I want to call attention to the fact the works that are sitting on the screen right now um are from the Columbus Suite which as Nong has been alluding to was produced in the early 90s which is is I understand it to be a response on the part of Carl to the quincentennial of the discovery of of the Americas um what we see a lot in this body of work is sort of jux AOS metaphor repetition um and he's trying I understand him to be interrogating colo
nization Western politics history race basically everything you environmental issues so what do you think motivated your father to tackle such Hefty subjects and issues through his work like and why was that important as an indigenous artist like why was that important that he was doing that I think that that's something really fascinating that yeah how how wide his his how wide his his Viewpoint was there I I think you know uh it he really viewed himself as a warrior and I think that's that's j
ust at the heart of it he felt that that was a battle that he he wanted to do way back when he first met my mom they moved down to the United States and they were doing Ceramics down there and they were they were getting along pretty well he he actually got um he was represented by a a pretty well-known a well-known Gallery in ta at the time and he was selling work regularly and they had a life that was really anybody else would have would have stayed right there they would have taken the beginn
ings of the stability the new family and things going along well and he told my mom that they had to move back to Canada because what he was doing his work was really important to what was what was happening in Canada and I think he came back because he wanted to address headon he wanted to address his experience with residential school schools and he wanted to see it it named and discussed and talked about yeah I think that's so important and and it's so interesting you know in the Contemporary
moment where post TRC you know these conversations are happening more and more and yet you know as well as I do you know indigenous artists like your dad were calling attention to these issues super early and trying to amplify those experiences even when residential schools were still open and people weren't people certain people were listening but but on mass there you know and I think that maybe why is why Carl just kept V you know visually screaming yeah he he really did like I think um what
one of the works that was purchased by the National Gallery after after his passing and around the time of his retrospective is a gigantic plexiglass construction and it was called a svage and it had a a whitewashed gun that's a real rifle and it's tied inside of a plexiglass construction and it shows uh hirosima at the top and at the bottom it shows the the back of the graveyard from his residential school that he went to and you know the fact that they could buy and collect that before and th
en come all the way out to that many years later 2005 all the way to just these past couple of years where the the acknowledgment of the discovery of children at residential schools and the the shock that that created Across the Nation meanwhile there there's a really clear gigantic painting kind it's been the elephant in the for a long time it's been trying to be very upfront and uh I I really think that you know I I think about him so much about what he would think about H how things are going
to go what's G to happen next you know I I I agree I would I would be so curious to see you know what Carl thinks of the way the world has been yeah and and kind of what's going on globally right now like yeah what would he have to say you know we can speculate but yeah but I I wish I wish there was a way to know yeah yeah for sure you know um maybe turning to something that's a little less heady um is kind of the going back kind of circling back to his recurring use of of himself as a subject
in his work and just kind of wondering if you can sh shed some light on on why he repeatedly used self-portraiture and the one story that I love so very much is the conversation between himself and Ron and Vivien yeah that's that happen so early on and I think it's really that those Works were're talking specifically about the self-portrait in Christian De bathing suit yeah that that was part of his very first solo exhibition alter OS at the Thunder day National what it was called back then yeah
and um so that's an exhibition at the Indian art center and at the time he's he's a few years into his professional career and he's having a tough time selling it he's having a tough time being it it took a really I I really take my hat off to Elizabeth mclen for giving him that first solo show not making it a a piece in a corner somewhere but giving him the full the full stage for that work and she put that work on the cover of that catalog for that exhibition as well and it's so incredible be
cause there's it he was really uh making work that wasn't meant to be put in a shelf and forgotten a bed it's oversized in every conceivable way normally watercolors are petite I mean there are very few large scale watercolors this watercolors is on 40 inch by 60 inch paper that alone makes it unusual it's exquisitely rendered there's no photographic work it's it is a work of art to be able to handle watercolor that well especially when you're painting yourself as and then to have this really gr
eat text on the bottom and I'm going to paraphrase it Loosely but it's something kind of like um I'm here I I I had to do this to mark my time in this way this is my life and this is my work and I'm here and here's the proof and where's yours and I think he curses in there a bit too yeah yeah which is great and uh there it is and there he is standing there looking at the at the viewer really like here I am this is native art and you're just G to have to accept it and then Ron nogos does a a rebu
ttal and there were rebuttal of I think his was um Carl I couldn't afford a Christian Dior bathing suit and he did he did a self-portrait in the nude it was very abstract and and funny and then also Vivian gray did Carl I can't fit into my deor Christian deor bathing suit and so it was a work that rippled through it rippled through that that he could do that work and have it exhibited and I think for people in my generation and younger it's hard to imagine a time when as an indigenous person you
couldn't paint whatever you want and have it have it be understood that that was your your right at that time there was no contemporary indigenous art there was only anthropological things and we were still under a salvage Paradigm of the anthropologists were the main people dealing with contemporary native art and it took a long time for that to change and your dad was certainly a catalyst to that change alongside many other artists of his generation and and I just you know in my own work you
know looking at the 80s and early 90s just this critical mass of artists like Carl just being like you know for I'm GNA swear like this we're gonna rep represent ourselves the way we want to we're GNA say what we want to say paint what we want to paint create what we want to create and you're just gonna have to a reckoning will come and you're just going to have to deal with it and it did we we've seen since that time that sort of Reckoning of of of indigenous art breaking out of really kind of
limiting ideas of what it is and it's true but you know I still feel like there's another shoe that hasn't fully dropped yet where uh and I still get the same question sometimes that he got yeah when somebody would true and they would be like ah it's they don't say the word Indian in anymore but they're like we were looking for indigenous art and you know maybe my work doesn't present visually as something that they would recognize in the image of of indigenous art that's a big reason for me why
I continue to paint and explore what I'm exploring for painting because I feel like it's my it's my duty to defend the freedom that my dad really fought for for all of the visual artists all of the this generation and all the the generations ahead that there needs to be the same level of freedom in of expression so that you can have a German artist or an indigenous artist know jibu or k or an artist from the world talking about their experience without having to have heavy signals cultural sign
als present and I think that that's still happening yeah I would I would be inclined to agree I don't think I think we're further along but I don't think that the issue is behind us that Carl faced in the 80s by any stretch I think you know I think there's these pockets and glimmers you know pockets of success and glimmers of Hope where where we aren't having to do those sorts of things but I still think there's discourse is not really caught up and and the questions keep rolling in and and I th
ink that this is precisely why Carl's work remains more relevant than ever because we need those guide post to be like this has been going on a long time folks definitely and I think that that's part of why he gets quoted a lot about the idea that he he was making art for thinking people and you know I remember being raised by him not not understanding racism at all like not not understanding it but then running into it and being really confused by what was going on because he raised me to be so
of course you can of course you can you know of course you can go to these places and do whatever you want he was that way and we would just be that way go where we wanted but we would still run into it and I think it's uh yeah it's just one of it's one of those things that that makes his work so so exciting to see even now that he's talking about issues of of Being Human and that his work was about his particular Human Experience but not to the exclusion of anyone else's and that that together
ness that he was able to to build in his practice is something really extraordinary yeah I think I think that that that element of humanness like absolutely comes through with his self-portraiture and the themes that he explores like and this is something that I think is is something that we it kind of is always there but we don't talk about it like we've been historically conscient like concertedly denied our humanism like our human our humanness sorry and think that that's something I really a
ppreciate about Carl's work is just this raw humanness like I'm a human being that exists in the world that has had these experiences and this is what I care about this is what pisses me off I'm allowed to feel the full range of feelings and I think that sometimes indigenous peoples get boxed in you know we're we're we are still in some ways living with that Legacy of being denied on humanity and Carl was like saying no I'm a human let me just be a human yeah exactly to to be a human and you kno
w that that was where a lot of his philosophical interests go in talk out in texts of small works and I remember a series of tiny little works with apples and where he was kind of meditating on the the an apple is an apple to the tree it's it's like the child of the tree but to the apple is itself but if there's like a caterpillar inside the Apple the Apple is G is a castle for the caterp there's all these different states of being that we're all passing through and that unite us yeah I know tha
t's that's such a beautiful kind of story it's also the caterpillar's home and its sustenance and yeah and it's a future tree eventually through the Seas yeah but yeah it's you know as silly as it may sound like that our teaching of you know it's we're all interconnected in all our relations it rings true when you break it down to that level and I think Carl was really trying to get that across like I'm connected to you you're connected to me because we're stuck in this in this machine or this w
orld or or you know but I just have a different Vantage Point than you yeah and I think that that was really valuable I think he he returned to that at the end with uh his second last body of work was the whale of our being yeah and that idea was he wanted to use the whale as an umbrella for our Collective humanity and I think it started with this idea of uh people at the time was a lot of save the whales and he was kind of saying he wanted people to realize that that was only the beginning of a
thought the rest of the thought was that if the world becomes toxic to whales we're included in that in that equation it becomes toxic to us and that there has to be there can't be any meaningful change without a a Viewpoint of what's Happening that includes us and that goes back to how he could bring people and bring that kind of personal uh qu question personal responsibility in the face of these very large ideas yeah and and I think he like really asks or requires the visitor to engage criti
cally with his work and to draw their own conclusions so back to your point like he didn't reveal everything he wants you art for thinking people he wants you to think about how what you bring to the work and how you relate to you know the jux positions he's making um and I think that that's really it makes it a rich space for for you know not only analysis but also just reflection as well yeah this is a really beautiful piece that's uh that's his mom that's my Grandma sitting by a lake there pr
obably about 19 19 yeah this work's called fragile Skies it was around what time maybe about 1948 wow that photograph yeah that's incredible yeah and I love that he would do that that he would mine his personal archive as well as like really iconic images of indigenous leaders but then like Western political leaders and then yeah kind of you know um I think there's even some like strips of like I think it's mapor um probably yeah he was so he was so Broad in His image Library he kept a kept an i
mage library of found images of books of images the the it's massive and he would work through that and I remember him telling me once that um a really great artist could make an artwork out of you could take any two images and you could make a beautiful artwork about them because everything was related so that to me showed so much about his his approach that he viewed it as a was almost like could challenge but also uh that it was easy to find the connections that there were more easy connectio
ns between us as humans through our our shared beingness on the planet yeah I guess maybe that brings me to like a process related question like as you're saying he would keep like these these archives or these boxes of or books of images and and then would then sit down and decide like what was his process like like for picking what he wanted to kind of assemble together for any given work it was really extensive actually he we have uh in the his archive which is was in the basement and now is
properly documented in an archive um but he kept it in the basement he had boxes and boxes of things well organized he he had a process where he would collect images so he had files files of images and like extensive heavy amounts and then he would do uh he would rephotograph and reprint them to have them in different sizes and configurations and then he would make collages of those images and then photograph them so that they became unified as an image and then that's how he would test to see i
f that was yeah that that configuration then out of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds really the thousands of these photographic collages a few of those became paintings yeah he was actually included in an exhibition that I served on an advisory for called in our hands um and I think if I'm remembering correctly they chose bu the ruler buring the ruler for that exhibition um out of the National Gallery collection and um yeah and I I don't think like people necessarily initially think of Car
l as as a as a photographer but that was so much a part of the process yeah it really was and and they also I think because at the time it had to be this singular he was such a singular man it was so sing like there there was this thing of like there he goes but there were so many people involved and so many people and he worked so closely with my mother and it was really it was really tough to watch the the lack of uh the lack of a credit given for an artist spouse because ironically the heavy
amount photographs that are used in his work they they're her photographs and they're her videos that she took of him that like they were working in concert so if you see Carl beam in the photo guess what I felt like this as a as a as an assistant in there as an art student and as an assistant I remember feeling like saying if Carl beam's in the photo folks he didn't take the picture you know and it was my mom uh although you know it was a I wouldn't say it was a collaboration they knew it was v
ery clearly his work but just saying that's something else too that's that's an yeah yeah I I I think that's such an important point to make you know for those of us that love Carl's work to understand it in context of this family unit of of this network of support that helped him to create his work even in the community from from what I understand and and the you know the resources that he would gather from the land for some of his you know more assemblage based remix media work and I think tha
t that's you're making a really important point it was sets of relations that helped Carl the relations he would make between things but then the relations that supported the practice too and and you know it makes me wonder in some instances should an be you know co-edited as as the creator of the work I I think that um she definitely should in certain respects like as far as Ceramics because there's a lot of his ceramics that she built because was the better Builder I hate to throw him under th
e bus at this point I know he I think but I think that's really beautiful it was like something they did together yeah yeah it was it was like a uh anybody who knew them at that time and actually I think that somebody who's on the on this Zoom uh Miss wolf maybe remembers them working at the Garden and just how they were always together they were absolutely Inseparable through their practice and and really helped each other with a lot of things I think that's so great I I it's true like a lot of
people think of the Artist as a singular individual like this individual genius and yet there's so many things that go into so many people that contribute to that genius yeah I don't think it it doesn't diminish the not at all not in my view of his work at at anyway to accept that I think they they really viewed themselves as a almost I think I'd heard them say it a few times that they were almost like a pre-industrial family that they felt they felt that way because of the way that they were l
iving without the time clock and it kind of changed you know uh as they went on but they they had this experience and also leading into me learning more homeschooling and apprenticing with them really was kind of an experience that was a little bit out of time for the the 80s could we just thr back sha to there's an image of Carl as a young boy it's portrait as John Wayne probably this one yeah yeah so how old is he here oh I think he's like eight seven eight and is that before he went off to re
sidential school or around the time that he went that's about the time that he went I think and that's him in the photo underneath yeah yeah he's the he's the boy who's smiling really big and has his arm around his friend he's in the front front oh in the bottom right yeah in the bottom right photo he's in the in in there oh well yeah I didn't know I knew that the two portraits were of him but I didn't realize he was in the other photo yeah y that is really cool it's kind of like a time stamp of
different phases of his of his life yeah yeah definitely is the the image of him on the left holding the I think that's a buffalo skull that's what it looks like to me that's kind of from that time where he was doing a lot of uh his more darker darker late 70s yeah yeah you definitely do see that transition in his work from because I've curated works from different phases of his career and you definitely do see that shift uh in his practice from kind of really dark and yeah heavy sort of works
to some things that are a bit more I don't want to say ethereal but like a little bit light and then he gets heavy a bit again in in the early 90s with yeah and then he comes out again into he comes out again and joking and more humorous too yeah there actually at McMaster Museum of Art my my previous institution we had a number of the works that he produced like close close to his passing I think it's like late 90s early 2000s which were all these like Hollywood portraits yeah and they're all l
ike super colorful and funky and they're all celebrities yeah yeah yep that's that's when he was doing the will of our being and and there were so many things under the umbrella of uh well really like under the umbrella of commodification and culture and like what you're what you're imposing on people or what you're assuming about people he was just endlessly interested in in the world I just I I just I I share that c osity um I I always stated my brother um you know my nephew is at that stage o
f his life where he's like asking why a thousand times a day and I was the exact same way and and I just remember be always being stifled like by teachers or others not not my family directly but you know why are you asking why we some things just are the way they are and and I never accepted that answer I was like but why why and even to this day I'm very much still the same of of of always asking why like what's the intention behind why this and I I think I share I feel like Carl was kind of t
he same he was always digging deeper than just what's on the surface I think that's why the interest in his work persists in that way because he invites you to keep asking why and and exploring different different meanings yeah yeah I I I I've just I feel like we could talk endlessly yeah about Carl um but I I'm am mindful of time and I just wanted to leave a bit of time for any audience questions if anyone has any burning questions they'd like to ask aong this is the time um we have the foremos
t expert on Carl beam um and it's just been so great to chat and and you know um I I'm opening the floor to any questions if anyone has any or we can just keep chatting yeah well we'll give them a minute to see if anyone it does I don't know that how I know if they did I think the AG folks oh wait let's see oh was Carl active online um no not he wasn't really um because you know with the internet developing in the late 90s and then not at the time he he was in that that we had a computer and he
he would ask me sometimes to uh look up things on there actually he did he did research looking for um survivors of residential schools and he found some early online forums about that and he printed out the pages of those early online forums and he included the image of transcripts in some of his Works in in the later 2000s and onwards um other than that he kind of viewed it like a he he I think he saw the way it was going maybe before well definitely before me I thought oh this is really inter
esting this is a it's a it's very school and academic and knowledge and he understood that it was going to be Commerce uh very very heavily oh um about my art and be paint St my father yeah absolutely my father completely inspired Bean paints I I actually started Bean paints on his birthday and that's the official birth date and I did it purposely to connect with him because at the time I did it I was coming through a really difficult time in my personal life uh leaving a really not good relatio
nship and I had two young sons and they were the age that I was when I started learning these kinds of things with my dad and my mom and dad and I wanted them to connect with that knowledge and kind of connect with him I wanted to connect with him and feel that closeness so that's when I started doing that and I would uh I would take the boys out they were three four five at the time about the same age that I was and we would go out to rock cuts and go rock hunting and I was showing them this ro
ck and that rock and you know just the enthusiasm of interacting with the natural world that way and getting them comfortable with doing that and it was lot of fun it was a lot of fun for me and I mean at the time Minecraft was a big thing too so I remember them like imagine you're that age and your mom gives you some goggles and some pickaxes and says have at it and you know it was they they really enjoyed the time too I think and uh it grew into that into Beam Beam paints slowly over a lot of
years yes so being paints as I understand it um from following you folks on social media I'm not as Super Active on socials but I try um they're all natural correct yeah I well it's more that they're they're plastic free we're trying to re reimagine a a delivery of art supplies that doesn't rely on plastic to be the the holder like quite a lot of tubed paints watercolor paints are all so heavily plastick the other thing too and this is partially because because my dad did pass away very young 62
and my mother developed Alzheimer's and is in a long-term care home oh I didn't know Ann was in a home now yeah yeah she is and uh she's she's nonverbal and I I completely I really blame their I I hold culpable the art supplies that they use um I think everyone who knows a print maker or an ET someone in etching understands how toxic those yeah those pastimes are also the works that they used they used oil paints they had cadmium and lead and even though you maybe try your best there you still
have a an engagement with solvents and turpentine and and heavy metals that are in those colors so that was really key for me in in the art supply development that I wanted to find a way to uh we actually third-party test everything that we use to make sure that it's free of heavy metals or anything toxic I could go talk a lot about paint but I we'll try to avoid it it's too it's too much no I think that that's so important because I've heard of other indigenous artists kind of suffering from a
similar condition in their later years and yeah yeah It's Tricky It's Tricky for artists and I I definitely think that art schools now probably do a better job but of Education regarding it yeah like workplace safety women pretty much pretty much yeah no I um I count my blessings then that I got to chat with your mom on several times I know I know she really enjoyed it sh talking talking with you she referenced it a few times to me later on how much she yeah that was early in my career too so I
just feel really lucky that I got I got to at least have some time with her over the phone many chats and she was really supportive and that that as a young like emerging curator you know was such a huge an influential figure like Carl and then somebody being like he would have loved this you're like it makes you feel so good y Oh that's oh this okay I see another question more questions Sally has one about um text and connection to the radio station oh yeah um so I think around 2003 he started
uh there there's up on Manan Island I think anyone who is close with indigenous communities knows of the the struggle to preserve languages and to retain uh after how decimated they were through the school systems And he as a student of text and language and someone who is spending a lot of time thinking about this he really looked at it and said this is an oral language we can't save it or by I we shouldn't limit our efforts to save this language through repeating it through text because it's a
n oral language he really believed that radio was the best tool to that it was best equipped to capture and preserve and share the the actual spoken sound of the language and that it could be a great tool for language revitalization and recovery and he started gimma radio as a pirate radio station because that's how he did things he just did it didn't think about you know what might happen he's like he's the type of person that's like ask permission later yeah yeah yeah right like he didn't have
a lot of time he just had to just do it and he used to say work first eat later like he was he was constantly on the move that way so he started it but it was before the development like there were no iPhones or iPads back then they were just about to come out and I think after he passed away the and around the time the birth of my first son I really wanted to do something to connect with that and to hear the hear the language again because I was really struck by the fact that I with him passin
g no one was speaking to me anymore like I just wasn't hearing because he he would speak he recovered his language and he would speak quite often and he was you know he was using it and then all of a sudden he wasn't and we went into actually going that was a start of a big Journey for me trying to get it licensed and to do it properly which was incredibly difficult and really shouldn't have been and that's kind of led to there's hopefully good changes going on in crtc broadcast indigenous broad
cast policy but his radio station is actually running I'm not involved with it it's got its own wings and it's a not certified not for profit and it has its own employees and they broadcast out of the OJ cultural foundation in ching and you can listen to it if you Google gimar radio.com it's streams 247 that's amazing I'm so glad that that you know he's left a legacy all over the place so many different ways both in his home Community as well as across the landscape of indigenous art and and you
know I um just this is a bit of a foreshadow but I'm more working on a project with ag and and anong's aware of it of of inviting artists to kind of reflect on Carl's influence on their practice and and looking at that multi-generationally so folks who have just graduated from art school and study Carl to folks that were his contemporaries and I think um I think his legacy lives on through his contributions and I think I don't see anyone slowing down on engaging with his work ESP especially onc
e your book comes out I feel like it's gon to be like very I'm really excited about that it's been on the on on the go for such a long time so hopefully it's it should be out this fall yeah I just want to call attention to some comments that that we received in the chat and the Q&A section just some expressions of gratitude and thanks from Diane and Christine um you know thank you for sharing your experiences with Carl's work with us I like everyone in some way I feel like we just keep talking y
eah but um sha did you wanna exit out of the PowerPoint I'm com back just to thank you both um and thanks to Sally for being here who curated um pieces of the puzzle and just as we brought by there's um Carl actually did talk about this idea of puzzle um and he said my works are like little puzzles interesting little games I play a game with humanity and creativity I ask viewer viewers to play the participatory game of dreaming themselves as each other in this we find out that we're all basicall
y human so I love that quote Sally and I we uh we we chatted about the title and I was like Carl he it's like a puzzle he never gives you all the pieces you gotta piece it together yourself so Kudos shout out to Sally for for running with with the title yeah so thank you all for joining us um wonderful conversation I think um and just so you know great dialogue and and really informative as well um I hope you will all return when we do the project with Brianne in the athing and um do uh come by
the gallery anytime if you're in galf um and thank you all for joining us um thank you so much than Mar for this chat I really appreciated a chance to connect with you again so yep I really appreciated it too thank you and thank you to everybody it's really great to see his work being talked about in this way okay do more of it it's gonna happen again 2.0 2.0 2.0 okay all right take care everyone bye bye bye everyone
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