Author: Natalia Lara Diaz-Berrio

It is a peculiar bodily experience to find yourself in a completely dark room which is otherwise illuminated with strobe lights and invaded with a disconcerting loud noise.

The piece by sound and installation artist Raven Chacon is an empty mirrored room with a regular tempo beat prompted by lights, and is just one of the works of art offered at Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, the latest exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Beat Nation started in a small art gallery in Vancouver and became so popular it turned into a touring show, traveling across Canada. The exhibition is showcasing art in various forms such as neon, house music, video, skateboards and dance.

Mark Lanctôt, curator in charge of the Montreal presentation of the exhibition explained that it is a “collection of contemporary aboriginal art [from Canada and the United States] with hip hop being the framing device. Hip hop has a way of mixing and remixing and so does aboriginal culture with things from urban, mainstream and European culture.”

Some of the artists exhibiting in the show are Jackson 2bears, KC Adams, Sonny Assu, Jordan Bennett, Raymond Boisjoly and Kent Monkman.

“It is a refreshing phenomenon to see how they reinterpret — ingeniously — clichés about themselves,” said Lanctôt.

Some of the issues addressed are: identity, stereotypes, language preservation, landscape, nation, and street art.

On display at the exhibit is Bear Witness’ “Assimilate This!,” a video piece where the artist mixes together scenes from well known movies in which commonplace Aboriginal people are shown within a soundscape of electronic music. In the work, stereotyped movie characters converge in a casual or even playful way because  “Bear Witness does not propose a pedantic critique of ‘white man’s’ vision of the ‘red man,’ but an iconoclastic reclamation and recontextualisation of Aboriginal imagery,” explains the curatorial comments.

Other works have an enchanting balance between man and technology. For example, singing mixed with electronic music or electroacoustic elements, handcrafts or ancestral techniques, such as beading, interpolated with materials such as plastic, vinyl or metal.

Beat Nation rejects the idea that aboriginal art is static and aims to promote and celebrate it. This touring exhibit’s timing coincides with emerging issues related to First Nation peoples in Canada such as the actions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the controversies surrounding resource exploitation and the Idle No More movement. In fact, issues brought up by Idle No More are directly incorporated in some of the works of the artists in the exhibition.

The show is dynamic and interesting, while simultaneously presenting outstanding critical questions about Native people and inviting viewers to interact in a new and inclusive way.

“It is a first step towards paying closer attention to native art,” Lanctôt said, and added that he wishes that they will “bring people towards a new understanding of the current state of aboriginal culture through its contemporary art.”

As part of Beat Nation, two mediated conferences with artists madeskimo, Dylan Miner, Marianne Nicolson will be held on Dec. 5 entitled The Culture Makers: Conversations on Art and Cultural Adaptation, dealing with the exchanges between traditions and the contemporary art.

Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture runs until Jan. 5, 2014 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. For more information, visit macm.org 

A woman is walking barefoot;her head covered with paper, her body with long fabrics, plastic feet stuck to her arms. Who is she?

She is Raphaëlle de Groot, a Montreal-based artist and guest studio arts professor at Concordia University. As part of the Artist’s Talk series, de Groot gave a public lecture last Wednesday in the VA building.

Eliza Griffiths, painter and assistant professor at Concordia, introduced de Groot’s practice as “interdisciplinary and polymorphous, maybe rooted in drawing. It includes performance, installation and curating projects.”

The talk started with a video of a performance done in the Venice Biennale earlier this year. It was a two-hour and forty-minute performance that took place in a public garden. As the artist explains: “I wrap my head in a piece of paper with tape which blinds me completely.”

All the actions executed after are guided only by her “hands and [her] sense of touch [to find] some points of reference that [she] memorized before.”

In all her works, de Groot takes risks, constantly reinventing herself. By displacing her body, she questions the role of the artist and their place in the creation of art.

In earlier works, de Groot operated using her experiences with groups of people that were outside of the realm of art. From there she drew inspiration, established connections and would invite them to contribute with their own creations, with their own signatures—whether it be through drawing, writing or photography.

“Her work always develops through projects or strategies involving her alone or with others within social groupings including: blinds, nuns, factory workers, putting herself in that environment,” Griffiths explained.

For example, between 1999 and 2001, de Groot started a project with blind people titled Colin-maillard. She drew them while they were drawing objects as they were touching them. She saw blind people as “experts of a different perception of the world that we can’t have, because we have our eyes.” There is always an interest for the space outside the vision and for the notion of construction of the self.

Her process first begins with the accumulation of a wealth of information and the collection of different objects. After which, de Groot becomes “a kind of curator of the body that the research has generated.”

She explained that in her work, “there is intuition at first and consciousness and awareness comes through process and often after.”

de Groot is interested in history, and in creating dialogue and conversations. There is always a “sensitivity to materials and aesthetics even when [she] is doing documentary work,” said Griffiths.

Artist’s Talk series is held by the department of studio arts periodically. For more information on their upcoming lectures, visit: studio-arts.concordia.ca . For more information about de Groot’s work visit: raphaelledegroot.net