Shoreline Existence, 1973

Galerie Woltjen Gallery, Edmonton Private Collection, Edmonton

Don Hill, ‘Sky Talk: Alex Janvier’s paintings are clues to an extraordinary way of knowing’, “Alberta Views” [online], December 1, 2009 Murray Whyte, ‘Alex Janvier comes full circle with National Gallery retrospective’, “The Star” [online], November 27, 2016

A founding member of the Professional Native Indian Artists, established in 1973, Dene and Anishinaabe (Salteaux) artist Alex Janvier of Cold Lake, Alberta, is an integral component in the reformation of Indigenous Art in Canada. As a child, Janvier was a pupil of the Residential School system in St. Paul, Alberta at the Blue Quills Indian Residential School. It was this experience that drove the artist to escape through art, taking respite in Friday afternoon art classes. Janvier remarked, “I could think about home...about the lifestyle of my people.” For a brief period, Janvier could reconnect with his culture, family and bond with the Creator through his distinct intuitive drawing. Later, while studying at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Art, he developed his artistic practice further: “He absorbed the early abstraction of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miro and began to filter it through his own view of the world. He would create Kandinsky-like organic wisps, tentacles of colour that would disintegrate, smoke-like, or coalesce in spots into recognizable forms.” Though acknowledging this inspiration from European abstract artists, it must also be recognized that Janvier was honouring the highly abstract visual vocabulary of his People and their traditions of bead and quillwork. As testament to his political resistance to colonization and the erasure of Indigenous culture in the history of Canada, Janvier began signing his works with his People’s treaty number ‘287’ as an active rebellion against the mass production of Indigenous arts. Furthering this resistance, many of Janvier’s works are titled with a loaded connection to the land. “Shoreline Existence” is an example of the artist’s use of language to exemplify the continued tension between colonial expectations and Indigenous experience. The title reflects the marginality of the Indigenous experience within Canada while exploring the visually abstract depiction of territorial boundaries, contradictory to colonial maps. In an interview with Don Hill, Janvier discusses Cold Lake: “The lake doesn’t belong to us...but to tribes from all over...there’s energy in this landscape...especially if you go in the lake. There’s an awesome feeling when you’re right in the middle. It’s so powerful.” The connection Janvier has to the land is palpable in this work. The fluid arcs and precise segmentation of fresh colour offer a poetic narrative in the abstract tendrils converging and bursting to the edges of the canvas.