Art Frame: May 2023

Thursday, May 18, 2023

MMFA 2023: Wolves-The Art of Dempsey Bob

WOLFS

THE ART OF DEMPSEY BOB

May 18 - September 10, 2023

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents the exhibition Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob. This is the first full-career retrospective of Tahltan-Tlingit artist Dempsey Bob. The exhibition brings together some sixty works by this artist who is at the forefront of a centuries-old tradition of wood-carving on Canada's Northwest Coast.

Dempsey Bob was born in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, He was part of the first generation of Northwest Coast carvers to sell their works at newly developing southern Indigenous art markets at the beginning of the early 1980s. It was then that the established museums were starting to understand Northwest Coast cultures as living, evolving entities, alive in the present.

Bob's carvings blend traditional narratives and iconography with contemporary influences. His exposure to oral histories, songs and dances from his young age has formed his understanding of art and its purpose within the community. At once traditionalist and avant-garde, Bob acknowledges the lineage to which he is indebted. What stands out is the quality of is carvings, the remarkable smoothness and the sensuousness of their surfaces unequalled in the world of Northwest Coast carving today.

With personal daring, Bob reinterprets the traditional characters and iconography from the age-old stories of his people by occasionally inflecting these traditional tales with influences drawn from European art. During a residency in New Zealand, he was asked to carve a head from a square block of wood. Moving the central feature of the nose to the corner position instead of a frontal one, he discovered an off-kilter way of presenting a face that was more sculpture than mask. That shift led to the experimental works featured at the exhibition, in which conventional mask-making gives way to contemporary experimentation in form and storytelling, as the subjects seems to be caught in mid-transformation.

About Dempsey Bob

At the forefront of a centuries-old tradition of wood-carving on the Canada's Northwest Coast, the Tahltan-Tlingit artist Dempsey Bob (born in 1948) has played a key role in the revitalization of British Columbian culture, both as an artist and a teacher. During his days in Prince Rupert where he lived as a young man, Bob studied with the legendary Haida artist Freda Diesing (1925-2002), one of the few women to carve totem poles. Over the years, he developed his artistry through constant reference to tradition and through his intense investigation of the Northwest Coast historic art objects at Canadian and international collections, and also studying the European sculpture and the South Pacific art.

Raised in the vibrant cannery milieu of the Skeena River valley and trained in the mainland Indigenous practices of mask and pole carving, Bob has developed his own sense of line that imbues his works with vitality. In his later creations, he has shifted away from the frontal composition, exploring sculptural forms that break free from the past.

Dempsey Bob is one of the important teachers of his generation. He is a founding member of the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art in Terrace, British Columbia, where he lives and teaches today. For his contributions to the field of art, he was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013 and recently received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts for his Artistic Achievement (2021).

Bob's book, In His Own Voice, edited by Sarah Milroy in collaboration with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Audain Art Museum, is a 2023 BC and Yukon Book Prizes finalist and made the BC Bestseller List of 2022.

Alongside the wood carvings, the exhibition showcases objects created by Dempsey Bob and his sister, Linda Bob – a heavy robe, a blanket and a chief's robe – illustrating their collaboration, a union of their respective, complementary practices.