Kimowan Metchewais’s Search for Visual Sovereignty

The late Cree artist made evocative Polaroids and mixed-media sculptures that consider the Indigenous connection to home and language.

For the 2002 installation Without Ground, the Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais transferred dozens of small photographic self-portraits to the white walls of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. The full length likenesses were posed in the ICA’s Ramp Space as if they were searching the empty expanse for something hidden from both artist and viewer. By cleverly using scale and gently fading some of the photo transfers, Metchewais, who at the time went by his stepfather’s surname, McLain, created the illusion of figures receding into space. Treating the walls of the museum as the “ribcage of a living animal,” he felt that his photographs were like “tattoos etched onto the bones of the beast,” anticipating their burial within the institution’s architectural memory, covered by future layers of accumulated paint.

More than a decade later, in 2014, the Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater meticulously scraped small layers of paint away from the ICA’s walls, creating stratified craters in search of the installation. The effort to uncover these photographic traces was akin to a search for Metchewais himself, an attempt to connect with the artist who had passed away only a few years earlier, in 2011. The search for evidence was forensic, replicating the investigatory nature of Metchewais’s wandering figures. “I think North America is a crime scene,” Metchewais said of Without Ground in 2006. “I hate to say it, but what happened to the land and people here was/is a crime. People today don’t see that. They understand it, they know it, but it doesn’t seem to mean that much to them. To me, it means a lot, in many ways.” The white museum wall became a site on which to consider the theft of Indigenous land evoked by the installation’s title, an example of the ways in which Metchewais’s photography rearticulates colonial memory. His work explores the ground, aesthetic and territorial, on which contemporary Native art and communities might stand, and his images propose a new intellectual space that exceeds the mere subversion of stereotype.

Kimowan Metchewais, Self-portrait collage, undated

Consider Metchewais’s most lauded work: the Cold Lake series (2004–6). It consists of photographs of children and other community members from the artist’s homeland of Cold Lake First Nations, Alberta, Canada, shot in the style of straight photography on the street or pictured wading in the namesake Cold Lake. Notes in Metchewais’s sketchbooks offer what he calls “post-Curtis portraits,” works that are empty of ethnographic baggage and instead emote “reclamation” and “a desperate, pathetic attempt to restore” and “to elevate human status.” It is a reference to and an attempt to move beyond the outsize influence of the photographer Edward Curtis, whose staged and romanticized portraits from the twenty-volume anthropological series The North American Indian (1907–30) have permeated the visual imaginary. Cold Lake Venus (2005) features a young girl facing the camera, hip-deep in the water that stretches behind her to meet the sky at the horizon. The photograph is saturated with what Metchewais calls “divine beauty,” emanating from the girl like the ripples in the lake water. “Look at us emerge. We are beautiful, standing in a magical place, just back from the Wal-Mart [sic],” Metchewais writes of the work. He succeeds in building new image worlds to express a fundamental connection to home and place while evoking Indigenous and Greek creation myths.

Born in 1963, in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Metchewais adopted his mother’s maiden name in the latter part of his life. He began his career creating political cartoons and graphics for Windspeaker, Canada’s most widely distributed Indigenous content newspaper, before receiving a BFA from the University of Alberta in 1996. His early work tackled the legal and cultural frameworks of Indigenous identity and tribal membership, questioning the means by which identity is defined and the demand, still present today, for Indigenous artists to perform a so-called authentic connection to land, language, and community. His 1989 painting A Guide to Doing Contemporary Indian Art pokes fun at the collage aesthetic prevalent in the work of First Nations contemporary artists in the 1980s such as George Longfish, Jane Ash Poitras, and Joane Cardinal-Schubert, the latter of whom was a mentor and purchased the piece. Handwritten penciled text on a red-painted rectangle instructs: “place images below . . . ,” “old photographs,” “some modern stuff for contrast,” “syllabics,” “buffalo(s),” “a few tipis,” and so forth.

Kimowan Metchewais, Raincloud, 2010

Metchewais received his MFA in 1999 from the University of New Mexico (UNM), where he began to rigorously develop the photographic and mixed-media practice he is known for today. He challenged the authority of fixed representation while pursuing answers to the question of authenticity he asked of himself and his work: “What makes Indian people Indian?” His mixed-media compositions and elaborate photo collages incorporate references to Native art history: ledger paper and parfleche designs juxtaposed with images of urban and natural landscapes, or pictures of Plains elders mined from archives and popular culture. His 1999 installation After, first exhibited in his MFA thesis show at UNM’s John Sommers Gallery, included illusionistic photo transfers depicting birds, insects, and bowls on the gallery walls, a process Metchewais called “photographic gallery tattoos.” It was an antecedent to Without Ground and exemplified his pursuit of “elegant solutions to challenges of narrative in space.”

Kimowan Metchewais, Indian Handsign, undated

The Polaroid was core to Metchewais’s process, and while at UNM, he began amassing an extensive personal archive, meticulously organized during his lifetime by subject and alphabetized in boxes. He used these photographs as references for his paintings and embedded them in his mixed-media collages and as transfers to large-scale works on paper. He cut up, rearranged, and taped them back together before rephotographing and reentering them into the collection as a shifting and circulating living archive. The tactility of the cut-up photographs, with conspicuous scratches, creases, and Scotch tape fastenings, distinguishes them from digital images, and Metchewais sought to maintain those qualities even when he rephotographed his Polaroids and digitally printed them. Metchewais commented at a 2009 conference on “Visual Sovereignty” at the University of California, Davis, that “few things compare to the silky touch of a newly developed print in the palm of one’s hand.” His Polaroids also freed him from a reliance on archival images. Instead, Metchewais’s use of personal source imagery avoided the need for intervention, interrogation, and reinscription that typically weighs down some work by contemporary Native photographers who explore the archive as a site of privileged access, subjugation, and colonial violence.

Metchewais’s Polaroids contain many series: toy buildings and animals shot in a studio; smokestacks and mountain ranges; flowers, cars, and other quotidian objects. In one undated set, the artist photographed his own hand in a series of gestures, some of which were later modified and digitally printed under the title Indian Handsign. Loosely held poses of an arm and fingers recall anatomical studies, while distinct hand shapes suggest a form of sign language. On these Polaroids, Metchewais penciled labels directly below the images: a trigger-finger pose is labeled “go”; an upward-facing palmis labeled “open.” The hand signs function as study and reference materials while also triangulating a relationship between body, language, and image. The signs do not appear to be based on American Sign Language nor on what is known as Plains Sign Talk, a historical sign language used by Indigenous peoples across central North America in trade and oratory. Purported manuals for Plains Indian Sign Language were published throughout the twentieth century, and the language was widely appropriated by the Boy Scouts and other non-Native societies and summer camps. Eraser smudges on the Polaroids suggest that Metchewais wrote and rewrote the labels, drafting his own language for this series of universal gestures, countering appropriations with a new baseline of bodily signs.

Metchewais circulated language throughout his work. He often signed his name Kimowan in Western Cree syllabics, ᑭᒧᐘᐣ. In several versions of his 2004 photo collage Cold Lake, the Cree name for the lake, atakamew-sakihikan, appears in syllabics underneath the English. These works are examples of what he called his “paper walls,” photographs printed on paper sheets taped together into wall-size constructions. They make clear why Metchewais identified not as a photographer but rather as “a sculptor of flat, rectangular objects of various textures and tone,” and because some of the pieces of tape are in fact photographic images of paper taped together, the simulation of texture blurs reality with representation. The papers were dipped in water colored by rust and tobacco, “baptized,” in the artist’s words, as a ritual act. Because tobacco is a sacred substance among many Indigenous peoples, the material of the work might be considered animate; “Cold Lake is a kind of prayer,” Metchewais said of the work.

Kimowan Metchewais, Spotted Kimowan speaking bubble, undated

That prayer is to home, family, and memory. Cold Lake depicts multiple iterations of a scene of Metchewais and his cousin Conrad wading below the long horizon line of the lake. It combines several snapshots taken by the artist’s mother from the lakeshore. The photographs are “a record of family love,” binding Metchewais, his family members, and the lake and sky in kinship relations. Given its wall-size scale, the close viewer becomes wrapped in the experience and memory of that place. These works are less about the recovery or performance of memory than a living relation to the land. They also situate home and place as terms that escape essentialism. In Goodwill, 118 Avenue, Edmonton (2010), Metchewais captured a scene of dropped-off furniture donations awaiting pickup along a wall in an urban Native neighborhood. The orderly rectangles evoke modernist compositions, and for the artist they stand in as one of many incarnations of home, both territorial and adopted.

Kimowan Metchewais, UNC Art Department Van, 2010

Metchewais was ever conscious of the pitfalls of representation. He taught in the studio art program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 2000 to 2011, reaching the rank of associate professor, and his course-planning notes include outlines of the histories of depicting Native America, from trope of the “noble savage” to the erroneous notion of the “vanishing race.” His sketchbooks contain drawings based on art historical representations, such as copies of the famous portraits of Native American delegates and visitors to Washington, D.C., drawn by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin from 1804 to 1807. Yet Metchewais’s fully realized works show little of the typically overwhelming concern among Native American photographers of his generation with debunking and overturning such stereotypes. Instead, his self-portraits pursue the kind of “self-made Native imagery” he saw reflected in online culture, as he wrote in a 2009 Facebook note. He fashioned a host of characters, such as the Marlboro Indian smoking a cigarette in a cowboy hat. In a shirtless photograph, his upper body, painted dark blue from the chin down, sparkles with starry points of light like the cosmological images from the late nineteenth-century ledger art of the Itázipcho Lakota artist and visionary Chetán Sápa’ (Black Hawk). A photograph from Metchewais’s graduate-school period depicts a figure wrapped head to toe in a black-and-white striped textile—a body that, while abstracted, evokes the heavily romanticized image of the Plains Indian wrapped in a chief ’s blanket.

Kimowan Metchewais, Long Hair (detail), ca. 1996–98

In 1993, Metchewais was diagnosed with a brain tumor that chased him for the rest of his life. Surgery left him with a permanent bald spot on the back of his head. In a series of Polaroid selfportraits, Metchewais, in a white tank top and faded jeans, dons a hairpiece that stretches to the floor. Using two Polaroids to fully capture the length, he drapes the hair over one arm and pictures it dragging along the floor beside his bare feet. Long hair was a sign of Indianness to Metchewais, and he incorporated his own hair into some of his sculptural installations. In a 1984 comic for Windspeaker, a cartoonish Native man with long braided hair, perhaps representing the artist, asks, “Tell me . . . what is the true essence of being an Indian?!” A guru on a mountaintop replies, “That all depends . . . on if your mother married off the reserve before or after 1950 . . . how long yer hair is . . . how much pure blood you have . . .” The exaggerated length of the hairpiece and its visible artificiality make up an ironic take on this sign of Native identity while highlighting a vulnerable feature for the artist, who lost his own hair due to repeated surgeries and treatments.

Kimowan Metchewais, Cold Lake Fishing, undated

Following complications from one such surgery, in 2007, Metchewais lost the movement and feeling in the left side of his body. One notices that his hand-sign Polaroids, which are undated, are almost exclusively of his right hand. Many of the words labeling the Polaroids—“touch,” “flight,” “recall,” “change”—took on a different valence in the wake of his partial paralysis. Metchewais called his studio “a laboratory” where he conducted an “archaeology of the self,” and in the years following his surgery, he seemed to come to terms with his body, identity, and artistic practice. Grow All Over Again (2008), a short film by Christina Wegs, intimately documents Metchewais discussing this process and his return to the studio after his hospital stay and rehabilitation. In the film, he describes a desire to revisit his old works and “to paint white and black rectangles over all the shit that I don’t like, and then go from there.” In an undated self-portrait, the upper right and lower-left sides of his face are split between two cut Polaroids that cast his skin color in different tones, one pink and the other bronze. Amid the Scotch tape is a series of inked black-and-beige rectangles that spread across the artist’s face but don’t mask his features. The original Polaroids were taken prior to his 2007 surgery, but the modifications suggest he continued to explore his body as a site of the etched cultural markers of ethnic and corporeal identity.

Symptoms from his brain tumor returned in 2011, and in July of that year, Metchewais passed away at his mother’s home in Alberta. The artist gifted his personal collection and archive to the National Museum of the American Indian, which finalized the accession in 2015. In addition to that legacy, traces of his presence remain online. In a July 2008 YouTube video diary, “tellytwoface returns from the rez,” Metchewais recounts a recent trip to Cold Lake following his recovery from surgery. He describes in near baptismal terms a full-bodied plunge into its cool waters, dipping his body like a prayer. “To go in the water and come back out, and see that view. That’s good medicine . . . I’m back and I feel full. I’m really full.”

This essay originally was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “A Kind of Prayer.”

All works courtesy the Kimowan Metchewais [McLain] Collection, NMAI. AC.084, National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution.