Photograph by Fish Griwkowsky, Edmonton Journal
Sitting in a gallery alive with aboriginal reactions to colonialism, Gavin Renwick laughs, "Obviously I'm not beyond the irony of a white Scottish male doing such work."
The work the charming 48-year-old Dundee native is doing is a complicated and fascinating matter. First approached by Dene aboriginal northerners, later hired by our federal government, he's currently Canada Research Chair in design studies at the University of Alberta. The designer/artist/architect is involved in an exercise in trust and, to some degree, healing - a long-due acceptance that modern building and architecture in the western subarctic should buck imperial tradition and finally meet the needs of its indigenous culture, instead of looking like matchboxes.
As always in the west, there are issues with the ever-blasting heavy metal of big oil speeding up the highway. To quote Yellowknife resident Fred Martin from a poster at the show Renwick neatly designed, "Having the pipe go through our land is like driving a steel pipe through our hearts."
Helping where he can to smooth these thorns is a lifetime mission, but Renwick has also impressively turned his research into the two-storey show at FAB Gallery. It's called Counterpoint: the Aesthetics of Post-Colonialism. Says its poster: "This exhibition presents methods and designs that reveal how indigenous environmental knowledge and contemporary design practice can combine to create a dynamic tool for shaping life in Canada's north."
The collaborative space is a projection of Renwick's findings over 15 years of study, increasing immersion and building among the Dene Decho community of Sambaa K'e in the Northwest Territories, and among many others that call Edmonton "the south." Smiling widely when asked about it, he nods, "the ability to be teased is really important."
Until Sept. 22, the front window of the gallery will be Renwick's architectural office, the gallery a wild mix of working studio, cultural history museum, objective journalism, pure art and, at times, a sprawling, cautious love letter. It's a thing worth seeing.
The tall Scot approaches his subjects from a staggering number of considerations, reaching all the way back to the 1763 Royal proclamation forbidding encroachment on native lands, up to his own impressionistic sketches behind glass. "That generalist approach that's not driven by outcome in a commodified way is particularly suitable for working in a holistic First Nation context. How do you not look backward? How do you maintain and promote cultural continuity in the 21st century Canada? My role is in some small way to help facilitate that.
"How do we take aspects of traditional environmental knowledge of aboriginal culture and combine it with a modernity that's chosen, not imposed? While I sit here working, I've surrounded myself with all my resources - by visual research, by historical context, by evidence of misdemeanours and bad practice in northern Canada."
His job, exploring and revealing, "is to tell a positive but critical story. It's not black and white."
Renwick talks of a hybrid approach. Quoted on the gallery wall, Chief Bruneau of Behchoko, NWT, put it this way back in 1921: "If we are to remain strong we must educate our children in both the white and Tlicho ways. They must be strong like two people."
Fitting for a campus show, there's a lot of reading. But in the belly of FAB's main floor, Renwick's framed architectural renderings are intentionally loose. "Within most northern aboriginal languages," Renwick notes, "there's no word for 'art.' The idea of it not being a stand-alone object, but a process, is sympathetic."
Like the posters of passionate quotations about displacement at the entrance, Renwick peels his renderings and layers them into abstracts, echoing humans all talking at once. It's here, from him at least, that we come closest to traditional gallery art, though the teepee-house drawings of young Horace Zoe, a Tlicho Dene from Gameti, N.W.T., have a folk innocence abstractors spend years developing. You want to live in Zoe's wild triangle HQ, maybe store your lasers and jetpack in its closet.
A video of modern Tlicho children explaining what it's like to be them is frank about the cold and hopeful about the future- not of assimilation, but of integration. Up the stairs, archival photos show the sudden shift in lifestyle of Inuit hunter Joseph Idlout, from living off the land to government housing in a space of 10 years. An image from his idyllic, "primitive" past was even hoisted onto the back of our two-dollar bill in the '70s.
Shocking, paternalistic, yet beautifully rendered are Renwick's borrowed pictograms from 1968's government-issued Living in the New Houses instruction manual, doled out by Indian Affairs, which repeatedly preached whitewashing. The nuclear families depicted are like cardboard cut-outs of Vulcans, sitting stiffly around the dinner table in ugly plastic chairs.
Work from the Sambaa K'e print studio, which Renwick helped design, finishes the show. This includes film showing how to paint and emboss a trout onto paper, with beautiful results. The success of this facility has inspired future development in the community. "It's not as clearcut as saying Government of Canada bad, Dene good," says Renwick. "That'd be completely reductionist and simplistic of us to say that. It's complex and it takes time. I'm afraid of being a voicepiece for the aboriginal world. I don't want to be seen as that. I'm a collaborator. They've had it with being told what to do."
Asked what he's learned up north, Renwick pauses at his gallery-window desk, new students scuttling along outside. He notes the simple questions are often the hardest.
But then: "I've learned not to assume anything."