Dark Chapters

Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau
Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$32.95 ISBN 9781779400536

How did I not know about Saskatchewan-based David Garneau? The Governor General award-winning Métis artist, writer and educator initiates integral conversations about Indigenous identity and experience, colonization and the academy through politically-charged art and writing, and now 17 Canadian writers have responded to his large, compelling and highly symbolic still life series, Dark Chapters, in a striking new text. Titled Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau, the collection’s contributor list reads like a who’s who of contemporary Canadian literature, including poetry from Susan Musgrave, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Fred Wah and Rita Bouvier, and essays from Trevor Herriot, Jesse Wente, Paul Seeseequasis and curator Arin Fay.

“Dark Chapters” refers to Justice Murray Sinclair’s Reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and many of the book’s contributors are of Indigenous heritage. Editor Nic Wilson shares how across Garneau’s lifelong art-making, “Each foray is soaked in [Garneau’s] incredible attention to the codes of history, meaning, emotion, sociality, and pedagogy.” The book contains numerous colour images of Garneau’s provocative still lives, which often feature juxtapositions between mostly title/word-less books and other items, ie: skulls, stones, tense or slack twine and other bindings, and Métis sashes. We find books and a bar of Sunlight soap; an upright red book “wicked” with burning, braided sweetgrass (at first glance, the image appears to be a stick of dynamite); an open-faced Bible on a Grandfather rock; a tomahawk paired uncomfortably with a teacup; fruit and flies. Fay writes that in these “salacious mashups,” the artist is creating “a new vernacular,” and his works “expand upon and challenge the vanitas and memento mori styles, introducing a modern Métis interpretation of still life painting.”

In his poignant response, anthropologist and legal scholar David Howes says it bluntly: “David Garneau’s artistic work typically confounds the viewer” and it requires multiple “takes.” I concur, and would add that the myriad responses, too, should be read more than once. Howes examines the role of sage smoke in Ceremony and “the treaty-making process”—“No smoke, no pact”—and explores the significance of Garneau’s painting Scientific Method Applied to the Sacred. He also discusses the sentience of rocks—objects/beings that frequently appear in Garneau’s visual conundrums.

Jesse Wente’s clear-eyed essay is among my favourite. The broadcaster, producer and activist writes about—and personally owns—Garneau’s still life “Formal and Informal Education,” in which a red book (symbolic recurring image) dangles from a spring trap. Beyond the formal vs. informal education represented in the acrylic, Wente appreciates the painting because his great-grandfather was a fur trapper who “live[d] on the land,” and the generations of family that followed received formal education. “The painting also suggests the violence that inevitably faces us when we seek the formal,” Wente writes, noting the influence of residential school on his grandparents. “This painting is us, and I think David depicted us beautifully.”

The images and writing throughout Dark Chapters are powerful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging. As Fred Wah aptly writes, “This life of the eye is anything but still.”

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