Rosalie Favell
The work that I have here started for me about ten years ago when Jeff Thomas asked me to be in an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I had been doing more documentary work portraits and more traditional black and white still shots or colour. I told him that I had this idea of making this fictional character up and going on adventures; and it was loosely based on Zena warrior princess, my hero. I started using the computer, and I can’t believe it was only like ten years ago that I was afraid to use the computer, I had been in grad school prior to that and someone said you should use the computer for your work and I said no, no with fear and trepidation. I had another friend, Larry Glawson in Winnipeg. We worked together and he showed me how to use the computer and how to sort of cut and paste and so my first images were of my face on Zena’s
body. I did a number of those. I brought my
catalogue to show [laughs] if people want to
take a look. That’s sort of where the work
started; where I started doing this collaging
of images together and working out…well
just story telling in a way… That was ten
years ago, this is many images later, some of
this work actually is……I started in ’99, did
Rosalie Favell -Transcript
four or five images and then I took a hiatus. I was trying to liken it to Zena’s seasons, you know so then I had, made the odd image… In 2003 I was asked to do an exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and that’s what the catalogue is. I went into mass production and got into really storytelling, I was living north of Sault Ste Marie, young, by myself out in the middle of the wilderness looking over this beautiful scenery. I made most of these images, well of the two I have … my Andy Warhol image, the little girl in the cowboy outfit and that’s my ode to Elvis and Andy Warhol’s take on Elvis ; still shot from “shooting star” when he played the half breed Indian in the western movie. My parents fortunately photographed us a lot; there’s a lot of black and white photos from when I was very young and then of course it moved into slides in the sixties and so I use a lot of images from my parent’s archives. My mother occasionally asks for her royalties, when there going to start coming in…? Most of my work is around my native identity, my Metisness; a lot of discovery issues, you know in my early twenties is when I named myself as a Metis woman or back then it was actually aboriginal woman or was it native. It was a series of, growing and learning who I 2
was and how I was how I existed in the times; you know where we didn’t talk about our nativeness in our families. When I look around later I realize a lot of people had brown faces but we didn’t name it that, because we weren’t from a reserve we were from the Hudson’s Bay Company lineage. I can follow back to my great grandparents. Thomas Favell was in the Hudson’s Bay and because of Hudson’s Bay they kept records of every marriage and all the children so I’m related to every Favell with one L and two L’s in Canada and we all track back to Thomas and Titameg a Cree woman. A lot of my art practice and my coming of age deals with my Metisness and I guess I realized at some point that I was leaving my mother out of the picture a lot [laughs]. I’ve got issues with my mother perhaps so [laughter] so I just brought her in, in “Searching for my Mother”. One of my seasons I was looking at spirituality and growing up as an Anglican girl who went to Sunday school. I went down on an artist exchange to Mexico and was overwhelmed with the Women’s Centered Catholicism of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I made an image about that and then still trying to come to terms with the….okay so I come back to Canada ….Where’s the Virgin Mary fit in, in this? It wasn’t that I was trying to say I was Jesus Christ [laughs] or anything or that my mother’s the Virgin Mary! I also found in this image of beadwork in an antique store here in Ottawa, I used to come to Ottawa on weekends from Sault Saint Marie to hit the city and travel eight hours and do the town on the weekend and go back. Tekakwitha was the Mohawk Saint and I found this beadwork and again trying to situate myself in spirituality and being mixed and dealing with, you know thinking of colonization and the effect of the church on native people and the result part was that I’m a Buddhist [laughs] ‐ which I am ‐ but I think that is the result. I searched for my mother for quite awhile there. This work, I’m sure you remember a only a couple of years ago when the National Gallery had the Emily Carr show and I was just blown away by this work. I’d always heard of Emily Carr, Emily Carr. When I was in New Mexico going to school it was always Georgia O’Keefe, Georgia O’Keefe and I loved their work ‐ but I’d never seen any of her work in person. I can’t really say that I studied art history and understood who Emily Carr was in the history, in the cannon, or whatever but I knew there was this woman who did these incredible paintings and I was surprised to see all of the native 3
imagery in her work. There’s these symbols of nativeness but where are the native people, you know. They seemed to be little blobby brown things in the foreground or in there somewhere or the totem poles and that and I was just trying to make sense of it for myself. What I did was I borrowed some of her work [laughs] thanks to the internet and took artistic license. I looked at her work and I thought she looks like my grandmother and I’d been looking at the archives of my grandmother’s photo albums and copying them because I don’t have them in my possession, one of my cousins does so I borrowed them and I scanned every image and kind of really lived with her books. I was really struck by this is what she took with her to the seniors home. I always make jokes about what will I take with me to the seniors home; probably will be my photographs and my partner [laughter]. She went on a number of trips, road trips to B.C. and there was this big tree, redwood tree that you can drive through and so this is her with her new car. It was a hand coloured snapshot and I thought okay I’ll have…I’ll have Annie, my grandmother, my nanny we called her, Ann‐E visit Emily. There’s this idea of documenting the experience this was about her being on a vacation, a holiday and being a tourist and taking photos, having photos of her in these places, sort of marking her territory or her space or remember. You know I was there. I put myself in, a nice butt shot [laughter] being the documenting photographer in this scene and you know this is the Totem pole that’s actually in the snapshot of my grandmother well actually in a different snapshot of her. I was saying to someone just the other day, I’m not sure that people in B.C., that aboriginal people there, maybe you could speak to this Arthur, whether they’d approve of me using their imagery either but [laugh] this was about me and my grandmother going to see Emily out in the west coast and have a conversation with her. In the end my image of myself and my grandmother were probably not much bigger than Emily Carr’s images of native people. I guess I’m just trying to put myself into the images and figure out where we are, where I am, where we as native people are in making images of self. These works are actually kind of different, the “Sherri” image there and “Searching for my mother” and this one, I’m in there but I’ve got my back to the camera as it be. The work that I think is more my signature work [laugh] it’s me front and centre, you know with the dream catcher or staring out at the viewer. I do a lot of self 4
portraits partly because knowing that I can only speak from where I’m coming from. I started out taking portraits of aboriginal women to try and situate who I was in the community and became a part of that community but ultimately I felt I needed to be the one that spoke from my position. I can’t speak from anybody else’s position this is about me and my Metisness and my… in between worlds of…of where I’m from right now so this image is more about me. I came to school, I came from Ottawa, I lived here four and a half years ago. Because I was living out, I made the body of work out on the north shore of Lake Superior, north of Sault Saint Marie in isolation, had a great time, had an exhibition and then thought I don’t want to be alone out here [laughs] anymore, I’m going to work for the city. I applied and got into the program at Carleton and I started learning about the history of the Museum and about all the renaissance and collectors and it just opened this whole world to me. I just loved it and within that first year or two I’m now in my middle of my fourth…no fifth year or something like this but it really seemed that first year I came across this image in one of my classes and actually I’ll pass it around. It’s a painting by Charles Wilson Peale done in 1822 and it’s called “The Artist in his Museum” and in it, I’m sure you can all see this from where you are [laughs] I’ll just pass that around if you want to take a peek at that but that image really I thought I can use that image, I can see me in there, and I saw me in there in a number of ways. What I was really caught up with was that whole idea of collecting. I think of photography as collecting, just you do it with your camera and it takes up less space, well now it takes up gigabyte. If only I only collected with my camera but I have a lot of things that I collect. You collect ideas, you collect objects. Charles Wilson Peale had himself, this is his body here and he’s opening up the curtains to his museum inviting you in and at his museum he had artifacts of natural specimens like skeletons of birds and animals and stuffed animals and he just had a whole variety of things. I changed it out somewhat. I had shown this work which is my parent’s family album in the black and white images in the background and I had shown that in the “I Search Many Worlds” exhibition in Winnipeg and that was my belonging piece where I knew where I came from. I used my source images of my parents and so I wanted to invite the viewer in and be the one to do the showing, to have the authority and the control. I must admit I had a chip on my 5
shoulder about curators when I moved here. I thought, well I want to be the one who writes things down and has the authority voice, because so often you get, the artist puts their work in the show and it’s great but the curator writes everything and they’re the one that gets credit so I thought [laughter] and I’m the one who just told them everything …? So yeah I had to work out some issues and understand where was I in all of that. I’m much better now; thank you [laughs] I love curators now. I realize that my voice still is stronger as an artist than an academic but this is my growing process. I was still very new to Ottawa so the Museum of Nature, this big mammoth outside I went, prowling around outside and I took pictures of that and on the original I think there’s the bird of America was the turkey or something so there’s a turkey in the original, so I went prowling around the internet and found this lovely beaver and so I just tried to make it Canadian in a sense [laughs] I luckily have a lot of images of myself I guess, I took a lot of pictures over the years. I love to use images that are ten years younger than what I am now; you know [laughs] …maybe not quite. So that’s some of the work. I’m still working in this methodology. I still love Polaroid and I still lament its demise but I love the format of an SX‐70 so I…I made my frame in the exact size of an SX‐70 so this squared sort of image and yeah I’m still working in that method. I’ve been going back to my documentary roots and photographing other artists, I decided I wanted to again document and do black and white still portraits of aboriginal artists. I was at a Banff residency and it was just perfect because there was a bunch of other aboriginal artists there and so I took pictures of them and interacted. I’m hoping to still expand and build that body of work and it was interesting because quite a number of them asked what I was going to dress them up as, you know [laughs] and so I don’t know. I kind of reserve dressing up for myself [laughter].