PATEL BROWN GALLERY | 21 WADE AVE

Native Art Department International | Woodland Boogie Woogie | Sept 2 - Oct 8, 2022

Woodland Boogie Woogie

Native Art Department International (NADI), the collaborative project by Toronto-based artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, has frequently taken a multidisciplinary approach to its conceptual installations, collective performances, and liberatory interventions in the technologies, bureaucracies, and systems of power that seek to reduce, define, and categorize artists. Through the détournement of popular media forms and the participation of communities of collaborators, NADI’s practice has deployed varied tools in its mission against the classification, commodification, and fetishization of art. So the collaborative’s recent turn towards objects in its present suite of abstract paintings seems like a departure from conceptual constructions and immaterial installation toward the concrete. Yet the Woodland Boogie Woogie series brings NADI’s core concerns to bear on the highly charged space of abstraction and formalism in order to access and destabilize the binaries that suggest any divide between Native and non-Native aesthetic worlds.

The paintings—vortexes of flat colour and black lines that punctuate and intersect with curvilinear organic geometries—slowly reveal the vestiges of their inspiration: the forms of the widely recognizable Woodland School of art, also known as Legend painting, founded by the Anishinaabe artists Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, and Carl Ray, among others. The colour palette and stylistic motifs of the Woodland School, such as the thick black outlines of human and animal kin figures, cells of x-rayed interiors, interconnecting spirit lines, and split circular megis (cowrie shell) forms, have been submitted to a collaborative painting process in which Hupfield and Lujan reconfigure the inspirational colors and forms through a series of abstracting processes in order to focus on the essential elements of the style. The subsequent designs were painted in tandem, each artist taking turns to execute the paintings in a choreographed arrangement as their individual approaches to and histories with painting brought together their distinct strengths and aesthetic interest. 

This painterly collaboration is an extension of NADI’s recent Double Fake Double Morrisseau series (2021), in which the artists each painted one half of a canvas with quotations from Morrisseau paintings, blind to what the other was doing. In this play on the Surrealist game of cadaver exquis the juxtaposition of contrasting segments of Woodland School florals and bisected transforming figures examined the plastic nature of the style and its commodification by the Canadian art market. The alienation of Woodland painting from the Anishinaabe legends and cosmological worlds that serve as the movement’s ontological foundation has of late been reinforced by high-profile reports of non-Native artists appropriating the Woodland style and forging Morrisseau’s work for financial gain. Hupfield and Lujan, two artists from two different nations, developed these dually-executed paintings as a means of navigating the commercial and increasingly commodified space of contemporary Indigenous art following their relocation to Tkaronto. Turning to the conceptual challenges surrounding the highly charged Anishinaabe forms of Legend painting was also a way to work through NADI’s move to Great Lakes territory from the shared space of Lenapehoking (New York City) where their studio collaborations first began.

But working on these paintings also cracked open an aesthetic conversation within NADI, as their distinct formal eyes differently dissected Woodland School painting, whether as site of land-based knowledge, power-etched socio-economic relations, or a return to formal investigations and painterly process. The combinations of color and line that leapt from the cropped details, juxtaposed details, and painted surfaces of the Double Fake Double Morrisseau series brought to the fore aesthetic ideas that have long been the purview of the Euro-American art and modernist institutions against, in, and out of which NADI has always worked. Woodland Boogie Woogie is a project that allows the collaborative to dually examine and work through the legacy of Western abstraction to which the title alludes, namely Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43).

Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie is an homage to New York and the pulsing movements and rhythm of the city and its music and lifeways (which NADI knows intimately and lived in for many years) as expressed through Neo-plastic visual logics. But rather than the grid of rectilinear divisions and primary colours that defined Mondrian’s Neo-plasticism—a movement dedicated to the distillation of the natural universe into the pure plastic form through opposing binaries of horizontal and vertical lines and abstract colour—NADI’s Boogie Woogie paintings are curving, expansive, and still contain the occasional referent from Woodland painting: here and there one can make out a yellow eye, a wing, or a berry. These are not complete abstract reductions, but NADI is nonetheless interested in the same visual hunt for truths that drove Mondrian. For the collaborative, however, these may not be universal logics of line and form; rather their paintings point to a logic rooted in local and land-based knowledge. While Broadway Boogie Woogie’s vibrating squares of color referred to the nature of New York City as place while breaking up the linear black binary divisions of Neo-plasticism, NADI’s movements break the stultifying expectations of outsiders for Indigenous art while abstractly referencing a style based in place. Mondrian distilled the universe through a series of binary oppositions, yet NADI draws on such an aesthetic legacy to aid in its breaking down of such reductions, challenging formal and essentialist binaries alike.

The movement seen in Woodland Boogie Woogie—visually, conceptually, geographically—is a manifestation of what Anishinaabe literary theorist Gerald Vizenor calls transmotion: “that sense of native motion and an active presence, [that] is sui generis sovereignty.” NADI’s project inevitably asserts the right to sovereign movement, real and metaphorical, across imagined aesthetic boundaries and treaty territories. Their co-painted canvases are communally self-determined, relying on true relations rather than a Euro-American modernist approach to individualistic autonomy, and their line, color, and bodies transmotively boogie woogie across the aesthetic boundaries and binaries that might otherwise limit them.

-Exhibition text by Christopher Green

Native Art Department International (NADI) is a collaborative long-term project created and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan that began in Brooklyn in 2016 and is now based in Toronto. NADI seeks to circumvent easy categorization by comprising a diverse range of undertakings such as unannounced actions, curatorial projects, video screenings, paintings, collective art making, and mixed-use installations. All activities contain an undercurrent of cooperation and non-competition while at the same time functioning as emancipation from essentialism and identity-based artwork.

Christopher Green is a New York-area based writer and art historian. He currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.