Bonnie Devine - Writing Home - Curated by Faye Heavyshield

Main Gallery presents
Writing Home the art of Bonnie Devine, curated by Faye Heavyshield
Friday, February 12, 8-11pm @ Urban Shaman
Free, Public Artist talk by Bonnie Devine
Saturday, February 13, 1pm @ Urban Shaman



Curatorial Statement:

“In this work Devine remodels the act of ‘writing home’ into an actualization of her correspondence with home, specifically Serpent River. Through photographs, sound, and impressions cast in glass, the artist presents her home, replete in texture and history. Writing and text have always figured in Devine’s practice; words and their meanings, their ‘look’ on the surface of the paper akin to the stitching of red thread on a white surface. The stitches become legible as memory and the handwritten letters are missives to her place in this landscape. Each of the components in this body of work is indicative of the immersive process the artist employs with her material and medium. In this way “Writing Home” merges absence and presence… words become threads and the rock transformed into the lens of glass remains the rock.”

“Drawing with and from rock, Devine gives us privy to a conversation of human geography. This is writing and this is home.”

Faye Heavyshield, Curator, February 15, 2008

Artist Statement:

“This work began on the rocks of my childhood home. Driving west from Sudbury on Highway 17, tracing the great spine of Lake Huron and crossing the La Cloche Range of ancient mountains, you come into the land of the Ojibwa; Laurentia. You cross over the ancient precipitous place where two continents noisily mated eons ago. And if you are on foot, you wander where their roots remain, exposed in secret places; the trusses and ligatures of the earth. Laurentia.

The rocks tell a story ages old.

Geologists and prospectors saw and read it early on and gouged fathom-deep pits in answer, looking for rare earths and minerals. Everywhere you see their restless scratches. Even as the drawings and peckings, the noble stories of the old Ojibwa, fade and expire under their feet.

The work in this exhibition was created in response to Sandy Wabageshik, Michel Mitch, Andrew Blackbird, William Blackbird (PeTaw Wan E), William Warren, Dr John Jeremiah Bigsby and the seventeen signators of the Robinson Huron Treaty, all of whose stories appear beside the portraits of the rocks; all of whom wrote home.”

Bonnie Devine, February 2008

Bonnie Devine, a member of the Serpent River Ojibway First Nation in Northern Ontario, is an artist, curator, writer and educator. Her primary interests are installation and sculpture and the development of contemporary Aboriginal culture. They are central to her art practice and teaching career and inform her work as an independent curator. Her most recent exhibitions include BadLand at the IAIA Museum, Santa Fe, NM; Medicine River at AxeNeo7, Gatineau, QC; and Writing Home at Gallery Connexion, Fredericton, NB. Devine’s latest curatorial project, The Drawings and Paintings of Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective Exhibtion, finished it’s tour at the National Gallery of Canada. Devine studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design and York University.