After years of erasure, Phil Gray says telling contemporary Indigenous art from traditional is hard
'We weren't even allowed to practice our culture, so quite a bit of the really traditional style was lost'
Phil Gray is an artist from the Ts'msyen and Cree First Nations of Lax Kw'Alaams, B.C. and Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Gray says that people might consider some of his work "contemporary" but he builds it from a "very traditional base."
While working on a new carving in this video, Gray reflects on how the categories of contemporary and traditional Indigenous art have become hard to define after the cultural erasure of colonialism. "A lot of people have no idea when it comes to Native art — even most Natives don't even know whether or not it's contemporary or traditional."
Watch the video:
"At some point of the last 50 years there's been a lot of artists that revitalized the art, but there's a huge gap where we weren't even allowed to practice our culture, so quite a bit of the really traditional style was lost."
Gray describes how this interrupted the way traditional practices were passed down. "The people that revitalized the art didn't really have a formal apprenticeship, so they started getting into a more contemporary thing because they didn't have that person to show them the exact traditional way."
This has led to what Gray calls an "elaboration on an elaboration" in Indigenous art. "A lot of the art that came from the '70s and on was their interpretation of what the old stuff was. What ended up happening was the generations afterwards would kind of start to try and copy what they were doing. So they're doing an elaboration on an elaboration."
Watch Gray carve in the video above and see more of his work below and on his website:
Art Minute is a CBC Arts series taking you inside the minds of Canadian artists to hear what makes them tick and the ideas behind their work.